Ripping CDs to lossless in Itunes.. HiFi approved?

To follow up... I did my own comparison of Apple Lossless vs. AIFF (using my PowerBook G4 1.67GHz, connected via analog 1/8" jack to an Arcam FMJ w/ Dynaudio speakers). I did a blind A/B test and scored 50% (half my guesses were right, half were wrong). In other words, I could not tell the difference.

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Hi Syncrasy... how I understand splaskin is within the (his?) context of USB output from computer to DAC to audio preamp etc. That is my context as well.

Because of the DAC being in the computer with the minijack connection in your setup I really can't make an informed evaluation.

:)listening,

Ed

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It's hard to say just how fast the computer needs to be to hear no difference in Apple Lossless VS AIFF. My 2.8 GHz iMac sounds the same with a Wavelength USB Crimson DAC. My MacBook Pro 2.1 GHz sounds inferior on Apple Lossless.

I now run all my music using AIFF. Hard drives are so cheap, why bother with Apple Lossless.

In my experience, Apple Lossless is inferior to .Wav, although it is close. Hard drive storage is so cheap there is really no reason to be using Apple Lossless. You can get a 750GB drive for under $150 these days.

Blackstone,

One good reason not to use WAV is that WAV files can't store tags, unlike every other computer-based file format. If you insist on storing file uncompressed, I'd use AIFF format, as they stores tags.

There is no reason why apple lossless should sound any different than wav, unless the decoding device does not handle Apple Lossless directly and the PC is too slow to handle the decoding in real-time. An Apple lossless file decoded is bit-perfect with the original CD from which it is ripped (just like a WAV file).