I think you have to sit down and spend half the time that has been dedicated to this thread, to decide whether or not you have a "golden ear" and are capable of telling the difference between a quality MP3 and a ripped WAV. I would be willing to bet that you can't. In car, with a portable and any headphones or even on your home system (unless there's a problem with either source or some other colouring of the sound during playback due to equipment).

Personally I would find it a huge waste of time, space and money to keep WAV files when I can keep the CDs as back up. Rip times are very fast (certainly when compared to the amount of time wasted doing any of the things mentioned in this thread). The time-consuming process is the lossy encoding.

The time required to decompress the FLAC file is, more than likely, a result of the file sizes we're dealing with - try moving a file of the same size around.

Bottom line, given unlimited bandwidth and storage space, we could keep raw tracks around. Lossless compressed would still make transfers that much faster. And lossy compression, would still have benefits and possibly no audible differences. Some people forget about the "audible" part.

Bruno