As far as lossless encoder goes, I have been using Monkey Audio and Musepack. So far I can not hear the difference when comparing to the original wav that I ripped off of the CD, My ears could be deceiving but I suspected the soundcard might be the reason. I've heard lots of folks swapped out their older Soundblaster 5.1 live or newest Audigy Z2 to the M-Audio Revolution 7.1 and they swear it made a very noticeable improvement.
For MP3 playback, I have a bunch of MP3 that were encoded in 256 to 320k, most of the time I use Zoom Player and sometime I use the winamp with MAD and some other codec that suppose to have the ability to decode 24 to even 36bit, I'd played with several settings and didn't hear any difference.
Now here's another question, If I play my music CD through my PC's CD Player and use the Soundcard analog output to my HK 3480 , would the sound quality suffer or inferior to the "real" CD Player such as Denon 370/380 5-disc changer or HK DV22??
