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Originally Posted by Solitaire1
For the music I rip from my own CDs, I use Red Book FLAC (16 bit/44.1 khz). For me, that is good enough since I listen to my music through my Walkman with okay headphones (although I'm always looking for better headphones).
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It's not only good enough, it's the only logical option. The music is *on the CD* in 16 bit, 44.1 kHz, so if you rip it, that will be your maximum quality. Trying to rip at a higher quality will just use up huge amounts of space for nothing.
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Plus, for me the higher cost and larger file size of Hi-Rez FLACs (those above the Red Book FLAC standard) offers no advantage since I doubt I'd be able to hear the difference. I base that on my own ABXY testing of Red Book FLAC against the highest quality LAME-encoded MP3s where I could not tell which sounded better. In some cases I could sense a slight difference but I could not tell which was which.
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Praise to you

There are people who vehemently argue that they can hear a difference between WAV and FLAC, which is just bullshit, of course. If you take a WAV, and then make a FLAC out of it, and back to WAV, the two WAV-files will be 100% identical (if nothing went wrong). When playing a FLAC-file, the audio player is just decompressing on the fly, and will effectively be sending a WAV to the soundcard. The only reason for a FLAC to sound different is when some sort of weird decoding stuff or postprocessing is going on.
The only reason for me to use FLAC and take the storage penalty over MP3 is that FLAC is lossless and can be reconverted to other lossless formats shoud I ever need or want to do so. I also have a FLAC music player because I'm too lazy to create a separate MP3-library. I couldn't hear a difference between a 320 kbps MP3 and FLAC if my life depended on it.