Ripping CDs to lossless in Itunes.. HiFi approved?

In my experience, Apple Lossless is inferior to .Wav, although it is close. Hard drive storage is so cheap there is really no reason to be using Apple Lossless. You can get a 750GB drive for under $150 these days.

John, you are absolutely right about the tags. That is sort of a big deal I don't want to downplay that issue.

However, I personally believe that .wav is the only way to go for ultra high-end systems simply because it removes all doubt that the format is compromising the sound in some unknown manner, however slight. The fidelity of the source material is important enough to me that I am unwilling to accept even the slightest chance that something is being lost for some reason we don't understand. It is simply one variable removed from an equation that already has too many variables.

The problem is one of confidence. With .wav and error correction you can be reasonably certain that you have taken your archive of redbook CD as far as it can go. So when the time comes to audition that next upgrade or tweak, you can be confident your source is as close to reference as possible.

That said, am I confident I could distinguish .wav files from apple files in a blind test? No absolutely not. Apple lossless sounds very good to me. But again, do we even know what we should be listening for? Do the difference, if there are any, manifest themselves on all recordings, at all volume levels, or on all equipment? Will a more advanced system five years from reveal some distinction that my system today wasn't capable of? I don't know, and I don't have to know because I .wav.

Use compression only if storage space is really at a premium.

Please don't use Apple Lossless--it is by far the worst of the lossless formats and there is a difference. It seems to strangle the life out of my recordings.

However, after retesting on my HD600 headphones and my reference system (dCS Delius+Purcell+ B&W N802) I cannot for the life of me tell the difference between a .flac and .wav file. The same goes for .aiff which is exactly like .wav except you can tag the files. If you want to save space and can do without iTunes, .flac is the only way to go in my opinion. Use Exact Audio Copy. If you have the space, in iTunes .aiff is the best format because it is totally uncompressed but the files themselves can be tagged with track and artist information.

Now with respect to error correction and bit perfect, I am not an expert but I think when you talk about "bit-perfect" error correction and "lossless" you are talking about two different things.

Bit-perfect and error correction deal with the initial rip of the the CD. This is the process by which a program reads and rereads suspicious areas that might contain errors, dust, damage, scratches, ect until it comes up with the right answer. EAC rereads these areas up to 8 times I believe. Because error correction takes the errors one by one and over and over it is possible that a disc that would generate audio artifacts when played in real time due to dirt, dust, scratches, imperfections, ect can be perfectly extracted into an audio file. The difference between a corrected rip and a CD played in real time is that with the rip, the computer has time to think things over, if you will.

Now, after the initial rip, regardless of whether you error corrected or not, the computer generates at least temporarily a raw .wav or .aiff file which is then converted into the lossless format. iTunes does this transparently but if you use a program like EAC, which claims bit perfect rips, you will see that after the initial file is "perfectly" ripped off the CD, EAC actually launches an external program that converts the .wav file into the format you want.

So really there are two issues. First, what impact do error correction and "bit perfect" rippers have on the uncompressed sound files? Second, what impact does converting to a lossless format have on those files?

Here is another question...if there is a difference in sound quality between raw .wav/.aiff and the lossless formats, is the difference the result of the encoding process or decoding process?

It seems to me that if "lossless" is actually lossless, then the following MUST be true: a .wav file, converted to a lossless file, and then converted back into a .wav file, should sound identical to a duplicate of the original .wav file that was never compressed. Try it!

If that is true, and these lossless formats do what they are supposed to do, then the only explanation for any difference in sound quality is that at the time of playback, the process of decompressing the lossless format impacts the sound.

It can't just be a question of CPU power because I am assuming that there is some kind of memory buffer. Further, I host my files on two machines--one is a quad core with 2 gigs of ram at 2.6GHz and the other is a Core2Duo at 3.4GHz and I can still hear difference in the apple lossless files.