Hey,
You shouldn't convert to mp3, then to wav...you lose detail in the higher frequencies because of the compression that is used to make the mp3 file size smaller.
I'll prove it to you: many of you use Cool Edit, it has a powerful tool in it called the Spectral Analysis View which will show you the frequency content of your audio.
1. Rip the audio as a normal 44.1khz, 16 bit stereo wave from the cd. Save it as an uncompressed wav to your hard drive.
2. Rip the same audio track and save it as an mp3 file, use any of the compression algorithms your ripper offers.
3. Open both the wav and mp3 into Cool Edit.
4. Go to View>Spectral Analysis View for both of the files.
You should notice that the wav has a whole bunch of colors near the top of the screen, these are the higher frequencies that are sent to your tweeters.
The mp3 file, however, will have a big block of black across the top. The codec used to compress the mp3 has removed the higher frequencies in order to make the file size smaller.
If you decompress and compress a file into an mp3 repeatedly, the higher frequencies get reduced more and more, and the overall amplitude resolution gets squashed.
Artifacts/distortion also get introduced into the audio as a side-effect of the compression. If you compress audio at a high rate and listen to it on normal speakers, you won't hear the difference. But if you play them on nice speakers using a nice soundcard you will certainly hear the difference.
Many of you I'm sure download tracks off the internet, you certainly have noticed that some songs sound better than others; this is because a high compression rate was used to make the mp3, or else it was compressed multiple times before you downloaded it off the net.
If your jukebox player only allows you to save as mp3 files, you should really get another ripping software....there are literally hundreds of them on the net, just type in 'cd ripper' into your browser and find one which suits you.
Programs like Cool Edit, Sound Forge, Wavelab, Cubase, etc. all allow you to rip pure wav files from cd's, read the help files.
Take care,
Nick
