I don't care what anyone says, MP3s are a perfectly goodsource of music. It's as simple as that.

I'm sick of hearing the tosh that always seems to spew fromthe mouths of snobby audiophile obsessives who blather on about how losslessmusic is the only way to listen and how they'll never go near an MP3 or a WMA filefor fear of being violated by evil bit-rate inadequacies.

What a load of rubbish.

I plugged in some Acoustic Energy Aego M 90-watt speakers(two heavy-alloy satellite speakers and a compact subwoofer) into a brand new CreativeX-Fi Fatal1ty card over the weekend and what came out of them was nothing shortof stunning.

Over the years I've used many sets of Creative computerspeakers as my earbleeders of choice; the most recent ones being a set of Creative Inspire T7900 7.1 surround soundjobbies. They've always been very good, offering good sound quality with theadded enjoyment of having the music coming at you from all corners of the room.

But after pluggingin this 2.1 set from hi-fi company Acoustic Energy , I am not sure that I wouldever go back. I was listening to Wish You Were Here by Pink Floyd and I justcould not believe how good it sounded. And this wasn't a CD I hasten to add,this was a fairly standard 192kbps MP3 being played in iTunes, with the X-Ficrystalizer cranked up to the max.

The twangy Gilmourguitary goodness, which starts up roughly a minute into the Wish You Were Here song,sounded so fantastic that it was almost as if he himself was playing right there in frontof me. The clarity of the music in general was simply fantastic, and only whenI descended to the realm of older 128kbps MP3s and below did I start to turn mynose up at the quality.

The bass was well defined; there was no distorted rumbling like you get with weaker speakers. The cymbals were clear and went "tssss" instead of a more muffled "pffffff". The midrange was wholesome and beefy, and this was the case with most well-encoded MP3s I tried.

To keep the testfair, I wapped in the remastered Wish You Were Here CD into the disc drive ofmy Windows XP machine and gave it a go. Hand on heart, I couldn't tell thedifference.

And it's not becauseI have rubbish hearing. And it's not because I have a rubbish CD drive either -it's good.

I'm 23 years old,I'm young! My ears are in good shape; I can even hear those mosquito noiseswhich only teenagers are supposed to be able to hear. So I feel well-equippedto spot any supposedly obvious differences between a heavily compressed MP3 anda semi-compressed CD. But I seriously could not tell the difference.

I can see how MP3swill sound really terrible if played through terrible sound systems and crapspeakers. But even then people don't seem to mind. How many iPod users do yousee waddling around town using the (really quite terrible) bundled earphones astheir iPod-to-ear music delivery system? Most people are happy with the bundledearphones, despite the fact that they offer extremely inferior sound quality.

These Aego Mspeakers cost around £100 and let me tell you, they're well worth it. They're just a bit more than a pair of semi-descent computer speakers, but the fact that they're made by a fully-fledged hi-fi company hints at something a bit more special.

The satellitesare quite small, and yet each is extremely heavy - a sign of real quality. Evenat extremely loud volumes, the speakers and sub maintain their integrity,maintaining the extraordinary clean sound without distorting horribly likecheaper systems.