CD Ripping software

If you are really hearing audible differences I'd say there was something wrong with your playback chain, not with the format.

I'm not sure why you are insisting on WAV. You'll just make more work for yourself down the road if you ever want to tag your files.

But mapman is [i]not[/i] right about EAC being "old and unsupported". The last release was a couple weeks ago. There's a well-trafficked support forum. Why give out misinformation like that when it takes a few seconds to check the website?

@Lostbears

It's going to depend on what you're ripping. If you ripping more popular music, of course more of it is going to be in the AccurateRip database.

No it's not a must. A FLAC file has the same data. It's like saying you must leave your Word files unzipped if you want the best textual quality.

The text you quote doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. He's talking about how much we can compress a stream, and indeed the amount of FLAC compression possible depends on the type of data in audio files. He's not saying that FLAC does some kind of violence to the data that WAV does not do. FLAC compression is still a completely lossless process, as one can easily verify oneself by repeatedly compressing and decompressing the same file and comparing the PCM data.

FLAC decompression takes place at the application level. The same data gets sent to the soundcard driver whether originating from a WAV, AIFF, or FLAC file. (Jitter is not an issue at this level as long as the application can supply the data fast enough.)

Now some people will blame the difference on the processor load, but decoding of 24/96 FLAC files takes up only a few percent of total CPU load at real-time audio processing rates. And processor load is constantly fluctuating from second to second and minute to minute, so one would expect audio performance to be pretty arbitrary if playback was this delicate.

"Let me say this again; there is a good sound quality difference between "lossless" formats, and WAV is best, meaning it is closest to the original."

FLAC is as exactly as close to the original as WAV is. They both produce the same exact PCM data. What other criteria for "closeness" do you have?

"For the record, I have used various PC and Mac systems ranging from Pentium 4 to Core i7, both desktops and laptops."

But you don't seem to have any more insight into how these systems work than anyone else here.

"And so is a $49 CD player from Radio Shack "

If I had to guess at what you're trying to say, you seem to feel that FLAC is "cheap" like a Ratshack CDP. This says a lot about your biases, but nothing about FLAC.