Apple Lossless Encoder - Audiophile Quality?

Programmers say quite definitively that AL is the EXACT same file when uncompressed as the "true master". If it sounds different to some, it is either in their head or in the way the gear is decoding the file.

And disk space still isn't cheap enough for me!

I don't understand the paranoia around lossless formats sounding different / worse either. And, yes, drive space is cheap, but it's not free, backups take time, all disk activity takes time, and there is no cost to using a lossless format. With WAV not supporting tag info, there is both a real cost and a logical cost to going with the uncompressed format. I don't get it.

I totally agree with Rdc2000 and Kthomas

iTunes is one of the crown jewels of the Apple empire. It is tightly coupled to their revenue model. There are some 125 million copies of iTunes out there.

In plain english this means that Apple has a world class team of developers and programmers supporting iTunes. There is no other format that can even begin to dream about that.

It sounds great, integrates all the functions associated with hard drive based music and its free...

If you follow Ckorody's logic you could just as easily conclude that you should use Apple's uncompressed format, AIFF (which does support tag info).

Regarding the cost of hard drives -- TB sized drives can be had for less than $350. In the audiophile world where $80,000 speakers are called bargains and people routinely tout $1k power cords I would think the cost of HDs wouldn't be too much of a factor. I could be wrong.

AIFF vs. Apple loseless -- if you're using a wireless system, then by all means go with data compression. Your wireless is going to convert and compress anyway. If you're not using wireless, then what compelling reason is there to compress? As an audiophile I can obsess about whether an original generation tape is used in mastering a recording, but I'm paranoid if I don't think it wise to digitally alter my entire music collection? All my computer training tells me that you have to keep a virgin copy of data (and yes I keep stored all my CDs). My legal training tells me that a copy is not the original. It's a copy and whether the copy is indistinguishable from the original is always in question. Why take a risk, even if very slight, with your music collection if you don't have to?

Scrith: Duh. Thanks for the clarification. I got AAC confused with AIFF, which is what about half of my collection is ripped to. The other half is encoded to apple lossless.

Anyway, it's nice to know I can go back and forth using the Max encoder. --although both formats sound really good from my experience, and I have a very revealing system.