The best possible bitrate from Sirius is their premium bitrate of 128kbps. There's not much point to recording losslessly unless your source is also lossless. When recording a lossy source, I just record it at a higher bitrate. If you're paranoid, double the bitrate to 256kbps and it'll be just fine.

Agreed, the music is lossy to begin with. Most conversions convert the original source back to an uncompressed file before it re-converts it to your new format. (Note: by uncompressed file I mean that it is mathematically uncompressed but the resulting file still is missing whatever data was lost in the original compression.

Then, when you re-compress it, it will very likely change it once again as different compression algorithms, and of course different bitrates, will apply the math differently.

I'm unfamiliar with how streaming format is converted to storable formats like .mp3 or flac but it probably does the same thing. If it directly converted you would be applying some kind of compression algorithm to an already compressed file/stream, which I'm guessing, results in even more variation from the original.


How much of all this will hit your ears in the end? I guess that depends on a lot of variables. Also, I'm no expert, this is all just surmising from my limited experience and reading.

Great replies !!!

I suppose what I am trying to do is make Sirius sound as best as I can possibly get it to sound .
I ordered a fairly expensive sound card for the home theatre PC . According to the reviews ,its well worth the dollars spent /
Have a peek here http://ca.asus.com/en/Multimedia/Audio_Cards/Xonar_Essence_STX/
I am uncertain as to what recording application it comes with but I am hoping I can double the bit rate at the very least . Also sounds like this card can upconvert .
One of my plans was to upload all my CD media to the PC so the new sound card is justified in comparison to a factory Gateway internal audio card .

Cruncher, that will likely be less noisy than the regular computer headphone output, but there's no process that can restore audio data that has been removed in a compression process. No increase in the Sirius bit rate is possible.