Audio quality - burning and ripping CDs

[DDY]

Hexus,

Quick question, does audio quality suffer if I burn music to a CD from lossy compressed audio files (e.g. MP3, AAC) and then rip back to lossy compressed audio files?

I’m guessing losses occur when the music is ripped off the CD and re-encoded but I want to make dead sure.

And before anyone suggests copying MP3 files directly to the CD and then copying back off again, that’s not what I’m trying to achieve.

Thanks,

[Terbinator]

I get what you mean, as I've done it but the quality question has always bugged me.

The only thing guaranteed is that unless you can rip from the original CD, then its the best quality you could hope for - unless burning to a CD doesn't add any unnecessary '0's.

[DDY]

Unfortunately the only copies of the particular album I'm after isn't available in the UK and the alternative, well...

And before anyone suggests buying online, that's something I'm looking in to.

EDIT: I've got my answer; Digital Generation Loss and Transcoding. As I suspected, transcoding lossy audio does indeed result in loss of quality.

[Funkstar]

Just like repeatedly opening, editing and saving JPEG files results in quality loss.

rip to a lossless format, like FLAC, and the burns you make from that will be the same as the original CD. And then if you rip from that burned copy to FLAC again, it will still maintain the same quality.