Higher bitrates required for digital music converts?

An article in the New York Times today says that bitrates for music downloads must be significantly higher for listening to music at near-CD quality. Since CD quality does not compare to the rich quality of vinyl, are we degrading the quality of our music files?

I remain optimistic. The process is still sorting itself out. Download speeds are increasingly faster and storage is becoming cheaper and larger. All we need is for some standards to be set. Mp3, WAV, AAC?  We need a hi-res codec to produce a file that is not overwhelmingly large yet still efficient.

Where’s the Other Half of Your Music File? - New York Times