AAC or AppleLossless


I am beginning to import all my CD's to my Apple laptop and want to know which is the best format to use for highest possible sound quality. I have heard recommendations for both AppleLossless and AAC. Anyone know from experience if one is better than the other? Thank you,
pardales
The Chaintech 710 with the Evvy 24 chip is a good source for bit perfect output on a PC. Price is about 25.00. I am using this with Via's latest drivers to my Tri Vista 21 DAC. I am using foobar2k with kernel streaming. Kmixer has been bypassed with this setup. Cmedia also outputs 44.1khz on the 8738 based card. I think another important aspect is the last device to output the clock signal to the DAC. If it introduces jitter and you cannot control it, the sound is crap.
Racernet,
Understand, there are multiple ways of getting bit perfect from a PC, but iTunes is problematic.

As iTunes/QuickTime is a Directsound/Waveout device only, (so far as I can tell), kernel streaming and ASIO are not an option.

Do you know of a way to use either ASIO or Kernel Streaming with iTunes? That is the problem I'm trying to solve.

If you could test this I would be eternally grateful.

Tom
Tom,

I've streamed DTS multi-channel files via iTunes to my Airport Express unit, and than from there into my reciever via the toslink output and the reciever has been able to decode and reproduce the sorround sound fine.

Perhaps and Airport Express unit?
Google is such a great thing... I just searched for
"kmixer bypass" and "kmixer bypass itunes" and got a lot of results...
Tom,

I have not used Itunes, so I cannot comment further on the possibilities. I use foobar2k for the Database which supports these options. I could test as most others do when I get a few extra hours.

Mark