From time to time the fine folks who run our dining commons allow a student or two to play deejay for the evening, regaling diners with whatever bizarre blend of music they wish. I've rarely been thrilled with the musical selections made by these individuals, though I'd be the first to admit I have far from typical preferences when it comes to music. (There's also not quite right about eating dinner to the sounds of a dance anthem.)

What really bugs me about most of these would-be deejays, though, is not so much the music they play, but the quality of the recordings of the music they play. More often than not, it's apparent they either ripped the song from a CD seven years ago or, more likely, downloaded it from some metaphorical Internet back alley without looking at the encoding information.

Back in the dark ages, when dial-up Internet connections were the norm and music players measured their capacity in megabytes rather than gigabytes, this tradeoff between sound quality and file size made sense. It was impossible to squeeze more than a few dozen songs onto a Diamond Rio (remember them?) with a quarter gigabyte of storage. Even the original iPod — with 5 gigabytes of storage at $399 — would only hold about 500 songs encoded at 256 kbps. Portability and flexibility came at the price of inferior audio quality.

Today, however, when even the most inexpensive iPod comes with eight gigabytes of memory and even a basic laptop ships with a capacious hard disk whose capacity is measured in hundreds of gigabytes, this tradeoff makes no sense. In fact, the two largest retailers of digital music — Amazon.com and Apple — now sell tracks encoded at 256 kbps, and many classical labels sell tracks encoded in a lossless format. So why do people persist in tolerating low-quality recordings?

Most people I ask this question say something to the effect of, "This music sounds good enough to me." Which drives me crazy. Anyone who claims they can't hear the difference between a track encoded at 128 kbps and 256 kbps should have their hearing checked. (Or buy a pair of halfway decent speakers.) I don't see why we should settle for less when having more has virtually zero cost.