What did you rip them to off the cd? I've done this a number of times by burning the AAC 128s to cd then ripping to High quality VBR mp3. When doing this I've not been able to hear any quality loss between the AAC128 and the VBRs - although AAC 128 isn't really that great of a quality to start with. I think that Apple should start offering AAC 160s for dl from iTunes. AAC 128 isn't close to cd quality in my opinion.

- trs