Just to be painfully clear, Merc...

What Bitt and Peter are suggesting is a double-blind listening test so that you can tell whether your MP3 encoder is good enough for your desires.

But I have to say that, for your purposes, I wouldn't bother doing that. I'd just take everyone's advice and use EAC/LAME to create very high quality MP3s and be done with it.

What was said earlier about WAV files was correct: You don't want to do your entire collection in WAV, it would burn out your player's disk drives and cause other problems that would make the player hard to operate. WAV should only be used for occasional test tracks and such. For instance, many people use the WAV format for certain test tones and pink noise tracks for system calibration. Otherwise, stick to high bitrate MP3s as suggested earlier.