Lossless Files Vs CD's

Depends entirely on your playback chain. If you have a low-jitter source and a highly resolving system avoiding an active preamp (very important), you will not only get better playback from CD rips than with a CD transport, you will find that FLAC and ALAC files color the sound and compress it. IME the only truly transparent format is .wav. Even AIFF format from Mac causes a slight sonic degradation.

Steve N.
Empirical Audioi

I don't hear any real difference generally, but I would give the edge to the lossless files in terms of overall quality consistency and reliability in that they effectively take the error prone real time optical read aspect of playing CDs out of the equation technically.

What are you talking about? FLAC allows you to download 24/192 files from the Chesky website, not wav.