Quote:
Originally Posted by fryke  But of course even the CD method loses quality, because _any_ re-encoding always loses quality, whether you scale up or down (and you're scaling up to CD and down again to MP3 or AAC by going through Audio CD). |
Are you sure about that? CD compression is lossless, so that part shouldn't lose any quality, unless the source is at a higher resolution than CD audio (like encoding a 32-bit photo into "lossless" 8-bit gif format; ugh). Are Apple's AACs technologically superior to CD audio in any way? I know they're both 44.1KHz, but I don't know about the precision.
In any case, you'll certainly lose quality whenever you encode into a codec like mp3 since it's a lossy codec.