CD to Apple Lossless, or CD AIFF Lossless?

I'm following the same track as others in the forums, plugging the Waveterminal U24 into an outboard DAC (Bel Canto DAC2, to be specific) and on into my system. I'd be very pleased to only do a single rip of my CD collection, for this U24 system, and I'd like to do it right. I'm wondering the best way (i.e. most accurate) to get to Lossless files. Is it better to rip to AIFF files first, then encode to Lossless, or is ripping directly to Lossless equally good?

I'm not sure of the best way to test this. I suppose, thinking out loud here, I might rip the same track to AIFF several times (in iTunes, in the Finder, both multiple times) and create MD5 checksums of each of the files. Then compare the checksums and see if they all match, or if one way shows more consistency. Then do a similar comparison with Lossless files, encoding a single AIFF file several times and encoding direct from the CD several times, and seeing how those checksums match up.

I don't know how non-equal files would match up acoustically. If the CD>AIFF>Lossless route is truly the best, I'll have to dig around for an AppleScript to automate this a bit. Anyone have a present solution for this? Thoughts in general, much appreciated.