MP3 and Ripped, here's a question for you guys....

If it looks like a duck....

Let's set things straight.

An mp3 is what is referred to as a lossy compressed file. Mp3's can sound terrible, mediocre, good, very good or almost CD like, depending on the settings of the rip software. Once a CD is ripped to the mp3 format, there is no way an mp3 player can accurately recover 100% of that information.

A CD that is ripped to a lossless format, WAV, AIFF, FLAC, Apple Lossless, etc. will retain all of the information from the CD. WAV and AIFF are uncompressed, the others mentioned are compressed but lossless (they are used for saving space on your HD). As long as you rip to the same bit number and sampling rate as the source disc (ex. 16,44.1k; 20,88k; 24,96k), it will sound exactly the same as your original disc. (In fact it will most likely sound better because the jitter is reduced to almost zero, but that is another story.)

Jamscience, this was my concern.

I actually had 2 questions, well first of all WAV is fine but I always believed that it is never 100% of the original, even the best quality ripped can never be 100% correct? I understand the that it could sound better since that was my main reason of placing this question (NO MOVING PARTS) on the transport part of things. So with a WAV file, what ever dac I use will do its JOB????????

And with regards to MP3 files, just say a "high quality" file with minimal compression, will my DAC still do its job as WAV file mentioned as lossless?

Please educate and thank you

Your mp3's will sound fine through your dac. Keep in mind that your mp3's will not sound as good as a proper rip using eac(windows program to rip cd's), using it's secure mode.

Rapogee - you can definitely make perfect copies using the right software - no degradation from the original, provably identical.

Loading these files onto a computer, reading it from a HD for playback, and out through a good sound card's digital output via SPDIF or USB2, and life is good.

I actually had 2 questions, well first of all WAV is fine but I always believed that it is never 100% of the original, even the best quality ripped can never be 100% correct?

Sorry Grasshopper, that is not true. The format of CDs is PCM. WAV and AIFF files are PCM files that computers can understand. Unless your source discs are in terrible shape, the files will be exactly the same (depending upon your rip software and how it is configured).

So with a WAV file, what ever dac I use will do its JOB????????

As long as your DAC supports the bit number and sample rate of your ripped file it will convert it to analog.

And with regards to MP3 files, just say a "high quality" file with minimal compression, will my DAC still do its job as WAV file mentioned as lossless?

I think I understand your confusion. The "player" program on your computer is what converts mp3's back into a PCM stream which is fed to the DAC. It can only approximate by algorithms what was lost in the compression. WAV, AIFF and lossless files are sent as a PCM stream without any degradation.

I hope this has been helpful.