that's only good advice to take if you aren't going to be upgrading your speaker expectations....ever. If you're going to the trouble of putting all of your music on a hard drive, you might as well only do it once.
Now people say they can't hear a difference between 128k and lossless, and that's fine, but there are so many people out there who CAN that it isn't just our imaginations....the sound difference is there. Especially in the highs and lows, and in live music, and in really pristine recordings. If you can't hear the difference, it might just be a limitation of your listening equipment. And your listening equipment might change.
If you want a fair analysis to see if you can hear a difference, find someone with a very good system and listen to lossless through a digital transport (a mac mini or macpro with an optical output, for example). Then do the A-B comparison with a variety of music you really like. I bought several thousand dollars worth of processing/amplification/speakers about a year ago, and my next purchase was a 300 GB hard drive to store all of the CDs I decided to re-rip to Apple Lossless. Took me a couple of weeks, and it was annoying.
But the difference, for me (and my wife, by the way) was obvious.
If you never plan on having a really great sound system in your life, and you don't play music "loud" very often, then compressed music should be fine for you.
But if you're like me, and you really enjoy sitting down for a few minutes when nobody's in the house and cranking up the tunes and having pure, clear, musical bliss wash over your ears, then don't force yourself to live with lossy persussion and strings. There's a real difference.
