I have both. For me, I have over 40K songs so for the sake of hard drive space I rip at 256 VBR to MP3 format. For critical listening I use my cdp. I am able to discern a loss in soundstaging and imaging with my digital music. Things sound compressed (duh!) with a loss of dynamics. But I am happy to make the trade off for convenience of quickly accessing my music.
I suppose if you are ripping to FLAC or some other lossless format then all you would need is a really nice DAC.
I suppose if you are ripping to FLAC or some other lossless format then all you would need is a really nice DAC.