Audio File Formats

From the beginning of time i have always downloaded my audio files in a mp3 format. After researching audio formats, I will continue to rip my music as mp3 because after ripping the song "Sold My Soul" by The Used at east 5 times, i realized that without very expensive headphones you can not tell the difference in sound quality. The different audio formats are broke down like this:

ACC: is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at similar bit rates :

AIFF: is an audio file format standard used for storing sound data for personal computers and other electronic audio devices. The format was co-developed by Apple Computer in 1988 based onElectronic Arts' Interchange File Format (IFF, widely used on Amiga systems) and is most commonly used on Apple Macintosh computer systems.

MP3 :s a patented digital audio encoding format using a form oflossy data compression. It is a common audio format for consumer audio storage, as well as a de facto standard of digital audio compression for the transfer and playback of music on digital audio players.

WAV: is a Microsoftand IBM audio file format standard for storing an audio bitstream on PCs. It is an application of the RIFF bitstream formatmethod for storing data in “chunks”, and thus is also close to the 8SVX and the AIFF format used on Amiga andMacintosh computers, respectively. It is the main format used on Windows systems for raw and typically uncompressed audio. The usual bitstream encoding is the Linear Pulse Code Modulation (LPCM) format.

ALL of these definitions i got off of wikipedia-not the greatest source of information but it will do. So anyways like i said not a big difference in file formats but whatever you feel you need is up to you. I could only tell any difference using Bose headphones.