itunes digital music versus CD,DVD, etc

Is Itunes music that is downloaded or from a CD transfer the same audio quality as the CD?

Purchases from the iTunes store use a lossy encoding (AAC 256 kbps), so the quality is not a precise match for CD quality.

The quality of songs ripped from a CD depends on what encoding you use. If you use a lossless encoding (AIFF, WAV), the quality will match the CD (pretty much), but if you use a lossy encoding (AAC or MP3), the quality will not match the CD.

It isn't possible to "enhance" music purchased from the iTunes Store. It is what it is. Although for my purposes I've found that the quality is generally quite good. It has been improving ever since the store was introduced.

For CD rips, you might want to consider ripping in a lossless format, preferably Apple Lossless rather than AIFF or WAV simply for space saving. ALAC will give you true CD quality files whereas iTunes Store purchases will be very close to CD quality, but will never be exactly the same. But you may not be able to hear the difference.

preferably Apple Lossless rather than AIFF or WAV simply for space saving.

🙂 Good point. Thank you kindly for the clean-up, Michael.

Just doing what I can to help. 🙂

Since you're resurrected a year old thread.... You'll need to convince the record labels to allow Apple to sell lossless. They are the ones that control the copyrights; Apple has very little control over it. Look around at all the major digital music stores. None of them sell lossless files.

ITunes plus is not lossless, but it is really good indeed. I'm conducting a survey through a blind test that is giving very trained ears a hard time! I recommend you try it: http://cdvsmp3.wordpress.com