i plugged my phone up to my car stereo the other day to listen to mp3s and the quality was NO WHERE NEAR what an actual CD sounds like.

this is why i fear for the 'death of the cd' days.  mp3s are so ridiculously compressed that even if you bump it through a blaupunkt, it still sounds like earbuds.

the problem here is that most people either dont have sharp enough ears, or dont know any better, and they think it sounds fine.

ive actually taken the trouble, with a few songs i like but cant find on cd, to remaster it myself.  its time consuming, but with dynamic eq and a couple slight filters i can sometimes pull it off. 

192 is still less than 1/7 of cd quality.  like i say, for most people, theyre not gonna know the difference, but for me, that doesnt come close to good enough.  everything still sounds real thin.

another factor here is the increasing trendiness of heavy compression in the studio.  engineers are stretching out every single freq band [especially for pop music], all in an effort to fool your ear into thinking the songs louder.  thats why half the people on the radio sound like theyre singin through a cardboard tube.

vbr introduces too many artifacts, and the mp3 format is inherently lossy.  by the time you approach lossless with mp3s, the file size is as large, or larger, than a wav.