Lossless Files Vs CD's


I'm curious as to how much difference have you been able to hear. Is one clearly better than the other? What are the pro's and con's of each from your chair?
digitalaudio
Digitalaudio - the jitter of the clock in your "hardware .wav file player" is critical. If it uses a common crystal oscillator, it will not show you what this medium is capable of. The Master Clock is THE MOST IMPORTANT thing in ANY digital audio system.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
I have been privy to some listening tests where a battery powered Hi Face via I2S was compared to any transport we could get a hold of - Wadia, Stello I2S, heavily modified battery powered Marantz and other stuff I can't recall off the top of my head. They are fell. For example on Dianna Krall Case Of You you could hear the foot pedals on the piano and its timbre was correct - on the transports it had TIM. Before this many people had tried to take on the Marantz mentioned previously with various transports and computer audio. They left humbled - I know I was one of them. But the Hi Face bested it - and easily so.

The system was extremely revealing - speakers - ML3 Reference - they are lined with steel and fully tricked out with Duelund VSF Copper capacitors, the DAC a PDX Level 2 and amps MAC 501's.

Thanks
Bill
But of course ripped files are sound inferior compared to it's sourced CD. I'm talking full WAV, of course, not even mentioning other, space saving, formats. There are allot of confusion and misunderstanding in these discussions because people either do not compare apples to apples, or they biased due to their involvement with the industry. However, I do agree with Audiogoner that playback from ripped files might sound coloured, but I believe that mostly due to the playback software “audio effects”.
Let's do very simple test and compare apples to apples, that you can witness said difference for yourself. Let’s forget about all your DACs, preamps, amps, speakers etc., you don’t need it because it just confusing the issue. All you need is a computer with CD ROM (might be USB CD ROM) and a pair of headphones.
Now, using any software of your choice, let’s rip any file(s) from any CD (your choice) to the HDD or SSD of said computer (BTW, SSD do sound better than HDD, but it doesn’t matter for this test). When rip is done, insert headphones directly in to the computer audio out jack, on the back of the comp and compare the sound of CD played back from the same CD ROM and ripped file(s), played trough the same computer playback/rip software. Don’t use different softs for playing back file(s) and CD, because different softs will sound differently. If your comp doesn’t have headphone jack (don’t use the one which is on CD ROM), then you’ll obviously need some receiver or something with headphone jack. BTW, guys, make treble sure that you are indeed comparing sound of CD to the sound of files, and not CD to CD and/or files to files, it gets very tricky when you playing back over and over again, same piece of music. Very easy to mess it up. If CD and files sounds identical then most likely you do compare CD to CD and/or files to files.)))
If you done everything right, you should easily hear that ripped files have a little bit less of everything i.e. less micro musical nuances, less airiness, different voice tembres, etc., compared to CD. It is similar to Xerox copy, i.e. everything looks the same (the writing is still there :~)) but a little bit less of everything, less clarity, less contrast etc. I wish I knew what causing it and how to fix it, but unfortunately I don't. (((
Xerox copy might be good analogy, but it is different with CDs. I cannot find any difference with headphones or the speakers between original CD and the CD-R copy. If anything, copy SHOULD sound better than original because ripping program, I use, reads CD as data - meaning it will go many times to the same sector until it gets proper checksum while CDP cannot do that, working in real time (most of them), and at certain point it will interpolate missing data. Of course it doesn't make much difference when CD is brand new but it might when CD has scratches. There is so many other thing involved including ambient electrical noise, that affect playback quality that in each setup you might get different results. Again, IN MY setup I don't hear any difference between CD and CD-R.
I find this argument rather useless, but here's my post with the goal of providing my perspective to those on the fence and trying to figure this out, rather than trying to convince anybody with a preconceived notion that this cannot be so.

I've been on a computer-only system for a while now, a highly optimized PC, so can't offer current examples. However, a while back I had a Rotel RCD-1072 (or was it 1082?) and a Squeezebox Touch, both feeding a Metrum Octave DAC through SPDIF. FWIW, rest of chain was McIntosh 275, Lamm LL2, B&W 804S. Playing the CD, or the wav copy of the same CD through the SBT was indistinguishable to my ears, but provided a lot more flexibility thru the SBT, while the SBT was less than half the price of the Rotel. I kept both for about a year, but eventually realized I wasn't using the Rotel anymore and sold it. Oh, and the ripping was done with dBpoweramp following the guide put together at computeraudiophile.com.

So in my experience, there is no sound difference - at best. It could be argued that dollar for dollar a good computer source sounds better than a CD player. My experience post SBT certainly suggests this is true. An optimized PC demands a lot more involvement from the user than a CD player, and that can be a hassle, but dollar for dollar in my mind you get better sound from a computer.

I hope this helps someone, sometime.

Cheers!