Download and "ripping" questions with a Mac.

There has been a great deal of verbage spilled over this topic in the past and no consensus ever seems to be reached as to whether AIFF, WAV, & Lossless are sonically equivalent. I think there is a difference, depending on whether you are using a hard drive source or a cd source. Plus, I think different players/dacs must sound different with each codec as well. I can state with absolute certainty that AIFF and Lossless sound inferior to WAV through my Marantz Sa11S1 and they sounded inferior through my Assemblage 2.7 dac & various transports as well. I burned any number of excellent sounding discs with internal & external burners & high quality Mitsui & Taiyo Yuden media. In every case, I found AIFF & Lossless to sound less resolved and duller.

Drubin, in the many discussions about this I've read, it seems that many positive comments about AIFF or Lossless are made by those who have moved on to music servers or hard drive based systems. Negative reactions to those codecs are made more often by those still spinning silver discs. I've not listened to enough highly resolved hard drive based systems to have an opinion about the use of Lossless or AIFF in that context. I'm still one of the Luddites still using physical media in a cd player as my primary music source. My perceptions about the superiority of WAV is solely in the context of my system. Obviously, there are a lot of people with excellent systems who don't hear things the way I do. Why? I don't know. Again, commentary in various forums just seems to imply that those with hard drive sources are happier with codecs other than WAV.