Hey now- Bose or other similar "lifestyle" product can sound good, which I read to mean "pleasing". It doesn't have to be the pinnacle of audio performance to be pleasing- its just, well, pleasing smile . We don't all eat the finest meal of our lives every day, but yet we probably eat things we like and are pleasing. Yet, it doesn't mean that when we go to that favorite restaurant and have our favorite meal, that we don't truly savor it. So its the same here. I like how my car stereo sounds with a bit of tweaking and I like how my iPod sounds too- does that mean my opinion is bad?

I really think the 800 is a fantastic product and it offers terrific, what M calls "data integrity" through its various buffers and various error checking. yet, I think if you get a perfect rip of your data, then you don't have the problem of bad CDs as we are discovering.

Anyway, AIFF or WAV are fine to rip to- they are just full size copies so that means you are not maximizing your hard drive space- but hd space is inexpensive (relatively). FLAC or Apple Lossless are probably fine (I have yet to test them, but I believe they would be fine) the good news is you get about a 50% reduction in file size over AIFF/WAV.

If you go with a lossy format like MP3, your sound quality will probably suffer, but by how much is the question. I think this depends on source material and the listener. If you go with 192kps MP3, I think you will get a nice size reduction with some good quality- this is what I use for my iPod. But I would never dream of feeding my M gear MP3 files... wink

happy new year all!!!

best regards,
Jerry

Best regards,
Jerry
Main System: 861v6, DSP8000s in corners, DSP7000s Center and Sides, 1-9 humans.