So after researching my options, I finally decided to re-rip my music CD's using Exact Audio Copy and Accurip into FLAC audio files. If you want to read more about lossless audio, I suggest starting at HydrogenAudio wiki. Another interesting read is the Lossless Audio Blog. It seems like EAC is the top choice in audiophile circles.
In a nutshell:
Lossy audio formats aren't good enough for playback on a decent stereo
WMA Lossless and Apple Lossless are proprietary
FLAC is gathering pretty wide support and can easily be converted to other formats
There's several lossless audio formats and it doesn't matter too much what you...
Building a Media PC has opened a big can of worms in terms of figuring out the best way to acquire, store and interact with video and music. So far, I'm largely ignoring the video side of the problem and concentrating on music.
As I mentioned before, the audio out of the VIA SP 13000 simply wasn't good enough and being a geek and an audiophile kinda guy led me to taking a deep look at getting a good analogue signal out of a computer. That quickly led to the core issue of digital to analog conversion chips (DACs) and I...