A few weeks back, one thousand of our readers participated in our MP3 bitrate test. Today, with the little help of a stats expert, we have results–and a recommended rip rate that most of you can live by.

Readers who took the test listened to three songs at varying bitrates on their own sound systems, and identified the threshold at which encoding quality stopped mattering to their ears. After statistically evaluating the results, we not only found that there's a bitrate that most of us can live by, we found that there is joy to be gleaned from uncompressed audio, especially if you spent money on your sound system.