I agree with dubzilla. Grab your audio CD using a good (for that task) CD-ROM drive and paly it from your HD.
But, you also can use one of the lossy formats with specific settings, and you do not encounter any harm to the sound qauality. I am talking about the Vorbis format with quality setting (something like bitrate for mp3s) 8 or over. If you have a REALLY good audio chain, set the quality to 9-10 while encoding your uncompressed audio.
For playing the audio files, definitely choose some player which does the "on-the-fly dithering" while palying the file, and which does all the processing in 32bit floating point numbers format. One of such a players is DeliPlayer, but maybe there are some others too.
DeliPlayer is also able to fully utilize the capabilities of your digital output card. For example, I am decoding media files to 24 bit with dithering and sending them with 24bit resolution to the external DAC. DeliPlayer does the decoding and dithering on-the-fly with excellent precision. I was surprised how good it sounds in comparison with players which decodes in 16 bit integer.
Of course, to be able to notice some difference, you have to use some quality DAC, amplifier and speakers/headphones.
