I guess you'd could call me an audiophile, although I prefer sound engineer. And now, I'm going to make some statements for which the rest of you will hate me.
1. Lossy formats are usually fine. There have been a few albums where I've had to go back and rip it as FLAC instead (Cheap trick '97, Enuff Z'nuff's Welcome to Blue Island spring to mind), but well mixed material will ~usually~ translate fine to 320Kb/s MP3. I tend to rip to FLAC more as a matter of principal (I dont want data I've paid for being discarded), but where space is a concern I keep everything in vorbis.
2. Your DAC doesn't matter nearly as much as you think, especially if you're using speakers. There are so many things that make so much more of a difference than the DAC you're using. If you're using speakers, is your room treated? How good are the speakers themselves? You have to spend quite a bit before your DAC becomes the bottleneck in your system >.>
3. Vinyl is not higher fidelity than digital formats. Vinyl can sound "better," since better is subjective, but it is not more accurate and anyone who says it is doesn't know what they're talking about..
One of these days i'm going to try a 192khz album
4. Alsek, I've got some bad news...anything above ~88.2/96Khz is pretty much pointless. Hell, the only benefit of going over 44.1/48Khz is that the hardware can include wider low pass filters (~20-25Khz rather than 2Khz) :p
5. 24 bit audio is pointless. At least, for the end consumer it is. Anyone who says it's "Studio quality" or anything like that doesn't understand why we use 24 bit in the studio. If you listen to music so loud that the peaks are at the threshold of pain and want to hear the faintest whisper in the background too, then by all means, keep pushing for 24 bit albums (Not that you'll be able to appreciate them for long at that volume anyway)