CD ripping

Lots more info in this review the I could post here:

http://positive-feedback.com/reviews/hardware-reviews/melco-ha-n1a-part-1/

Here's a suggestion you might not have thought of. If you can arrange it, listen to your test rips on a decent pair of headphones, preferably via a good quality headphone amplifier, not a portable device like an iPhone.

This may matter because in my experience you'll hear things in a tune, a rip, or an audio mix via headphones that are hard to hear from speakers unless the speaker system is high resolution, the listening environment well isolated, and the volume pretty high.

You should definitely rip your CDs in Apple Lossles before dumping them! Or flac, wav, whatever...I have a hard time noticing the difference and then questioning my hearing when listening thru iPod into SR-71 into Sennheisers but with Pono into balanced h/p (rewired Beyerdynamics and also Senns) the difference is obvious to me. I disagree with a previous post, once iPod or Pono are connected to my big-rig stereo (its top "olive" series Naim), the difference is much more obvious for me. So... Whatever your ABX testing results now, do save your collection in "lossless" format!

Sevs, thanks for guidance - I'm in process of doing that.

cheers

Question - ripped my CDs as FLAC using dbpoweramp and stored them thumb drives which I play thru my Bryston combo in my main system.
Now I want to load some of those music files onto an iPad Nano To listen while walking. Can I just use my laptop and drag the files off my thumb drives to my Nano or do I need to first download iTunes and convert my FLAC files to Apple Lossless before loading them onto my Nano?