Greetings. I'm in a disagreement with a friend and neither of us are experienced audio people like a lot of you on Hydrogenaudio, so I registered to ask you mighty bastions of audiophilia.

My friend claims that burning MP4/AAC files (i.e., iTunes files) to an audio CD creates additional loss beyond the original loss caused by creating the MP4/AAC file in the first place.

I claim that because audio CD is LPCM and LPCM is lossless, any conversion to audio CD/CDA will have literally no degradation in audio quality from the MP4/AAC file.

So, AAC>CDA. Any audio quality lost at all, or not?

Thank you.

I am by no means an expert when it comes to this but I can tell you that no loss is introduced as long as the burning process went fine. Now your drive could mess things up but that would be a physical error. It would not be an error (or quality loss) introduced by transcoding the AAC files to linear PCM.

So an audio CD made from AAC files will have the exact same quality as the source AAC files. This holds true for any lossless format. You can convert the AAC files to WAV, FLAC, Apple lossless, TAK, etc. and the lossless files will have the exact same audio quality as the source AAC files.

Ask your friend where they heard that burning an audio CD would introduce more quality loss. I am curious about it.

A possible way is when the specs of the audio being burnt are higher than that for audio CDs (ie. 24 bit 96kHz); however, the chances of this are very slim, and certainly wouldn't be the case if the material was ripped from a CD to begin with.