Sound Quality

+1 @cleeds

He’s correct. There is no loss and the extracted data from FLAC, ALAC or WAV is the same.

There was a period of time when at least Stereophile was promoting the idea that the decompression process itself could result in audible effects like jitter depending on the device, CPU, algorithm, etc. and that because FLAC and ALAC used different decompression methods the three (FLAC, ALAC, WAV) could actually sound different even though they held the same data. Honestly I’ve never lent that theory much credibility. It certainly is possible that poorly implemented software with highly variable CPU performance could make for poor replay experience but I’ve never actually heard that happen.

If it did happen it would be very much replay device dependent, and in the 21st century I just can’t believe devices could overlook these issues and not mitigate them.  Decompression, buffering and clock driven DAC is just not rocket science anymore.

@erik_squires, which format would you recommend that I rip CDs Eric or does it matter?

@navyachts if storage space is a concern you can rip in compressed FLAC. I have plenty of storage and not too many CDs left to rip so I do it in uncompressed FLAC using dbpoweramp. I haven’t compared compressed vs uncompressed but am assuming the quality won’t suffer as long as the device rendering it has capacity to do it. In your case it’s the N200 with plenty of compute so I wouldn’t anticipate any issues at all.

let’s see what @erik_squires says as well

OP:

FLAC is the most common, and offers good compression.  You can adjust the level of compression based on how fast you want it to rip.  There's only so much it can compress though, so there is also the issue of diminishing returns and that disk storage is really cheap.

Unless you are using Apple devices there's no reason to use ALAC. 

OK thanks gentlemen, FLAC it is! Further to ripping, is any old CD rom drive, like that of an old laptop OK? Or is it the better the drive, the better the rip?