CD changer placement

Xer here and agreed, though it also depends on the equipment. If I do that test of a CD versus a USB on my wife's Rav4 it's minimal if any, at least to her. In my truck it's another story but I have 800 watts in there.

Another possibility, though I haven't shot.

I have a 100 plus 1 in my house. Haha.

 

At least with CDs you can extract FLAC. If I was going through the trouble of converting, I'd do a 320kpbs MP3 and a FLAC, and make sure I get a receiver that can play both off a flash drive

 

FLAC and WAV are the same (lossless PCM extractions of the CD), except FLAC stores metadata and supports variable bitrate, making it superior.

 

How can they be the same if one is missing 40% of the information? Lossless is a euphemism for virtually no loss. There is a very tiny amount of loss because FLAC is a compressed format. WAV has no loss…it’s a perfect copy and uncompressed. It doesn’t need a variable bitrate to sound better. It doesn’t want for metadata. It only stores the music…nothing more…nothing less. It’s just not the latest, greatest thing.

Use FLAC if you’re concerned about storage space and want to alter/mess with the music file. Use WAV if you want absolute quality at the expense of being a large file. Most of us will not know the difference. But like I said storage is not an issue these days.

I remember all the hoopla around MP3s back in the day. With FLAC, it is understood that only audio engineers are able to hear the difference. Because they have better hearing? Nope. It’s because they have the level of equipment to hear it. You may not hear the difference across the board...but you'll hear it in select moments within a track...a few of us live for those moments.