I agree in certain respects - except that it's not actually audible quality that I'm too worried about ( I could live with pops and crackles) it's that music sounds somehow flatter and less interesting at lower bit-rates. I find myself getting generally bored of it more easily.

I started out with a teeny MP3 player with 16MB in it (back in the 90s), and all of my music was at 64kbps, which really brought this out (but it took me a while to realise). 128kbps seems fine to me - but I am worried that 256kbps re-encoded to 128kbps might suffer the same problem.