Ripping CDs to lossless in Itunes.. HiFi approved?

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.

Thorough and thoughtful, Blackstonejd. Thanks for those posts. Hopefully we will someday know, definitively, answers to the questions you pose.

Opening another cans of worms, an industry insider recently talked about the playback software having its own sound. iTunes is said to have a "false transparency," whatever that means. Clearly, bit-perfect is only half the battle.