...definitely will hear cracks, pops, and compression artifacts on high frequency stuff.

Just to be painfully clear here (since Jens is new to this black art of MP3 creation)...

If you encounter cracks and pops (or instrument sounds shifting suddenly between the left or right channels), you're encountering issues with the Digital Audio Extraction from the CD-ROM drive, and these have to be fixed by activating the "sector synchronization" feature of your ripping software.

Compression artifacts are unrelated to those things, and are a lot more subtle.

Remember that ripping a CD is two distinct steps: 1) The digital extraction of the audio from the CD, and 2) the data-compression of that full-bandwidth audio into MP3 format. Things can sometimes go wrong in both sides of that equation, but the problems manifest themselves differently.

Tony Fabris
Empeg #144