I have been asked to make a compilation CD for a DJ friend of mine. Can anyone tell me what the quality will be like going back to WAV from MP3.
I currently use Audiograbber with external encoder running Lame.exe with --alt -preset standard --nogap . Thanks

Same quality as the mp3...
mp3 is decoded to PCM (format the wav file contains) on playback.

The quality will be just like the MP3 file you decode from.
Remember that MP3 is a lossy encoder, so there is no way to get back what was lost in the encoding process!

Solaris

Cheers guys. Do you see this as acceptable or would you recommend an alternative.

I see what you are doing as acceptable but today most burning programs support making audio CDs from MP3s so for those programs there is no need to convert the MP3s to WAV before burning since the program will convert the MP3s to WAV during the burning process.

Thanks

As the others have already said, the quality will depend on the quality of the mp3's.

However, it will also depend on the quality of the decoder. Not all are created equal, even after all this time.

Some may have pretty bad decoding abilities, with lots of round-off issues. That can effect the listening quality.

The better ones will all give the same output +- 1 bit.

Most fall into the "okay" or "good" category, so just don't use some old sloppy program.