> On another note, most rippers have an option to rip in analog. Yes, it > takes longer, yes, the sound quality is diminished, but if you're ripping > to MP3, you're losing a lot anyway so what's the difference if it comes > from an analog source? Anyone with more audio expertise care to comment? You're adding in noise from the DA/AD conversion, plus the DAC's in cdroms aren't known for their quality, it changes the EQ a bit, and its bad enough the typical napster luser manages to f*ck up a direct digital rip, (Their CDROM is sucky and skips, and/or get left and right flipped every other sector. And then they encode the result with a shitty ass encoder.) I'd hate to see a poliferation of analog recordings. Either too much gain, not enough, the twit didn't turn off their microphone, etc... Recording off the digital out would be better, but still most consumer soundcards with digital I/O do resampling so its still not a perfect copy. The SBLive in particular is locked at 48khz internally, all output is interpolated up to 48k, and then resampled down to 44.1 on the digital out if thats what its set to.