You don't need whiz-bang software to do that. Even protected files can be transcoded. (At absolute worst, if you don't have an in-place transcoder, you can still burn them to a music CD and rip that CD.)

His point is, no matter how high quality you make the MP3, you've just lossy-compressed a piece of music a second time, and thus get something that's a one-stage-lower quality than the original recording.

His desire was to play back the files as he'd purchased them, without having to transcode or otherwise change them. Since the central is supposed to play unprotected WMA files, and the web site that sold him the files said they were unprotected, I think that's a reasonable desire.

I'm still very curious what's special about those files. If for no other reason than so that I can document it for the FAQ.