Ripping CD's to my Mac Pro?

WAV and Apple lossless both faithfully reproduce the audio signal that is on the CD. Apple Lossless takes less space on your hard drive than WAV.

If you go to lower bit rate, using mp3 or AAC, then you may well notice audio degradation on a high end audio system.

I would recommend Apple Loseless. It is uncompressed so you will hear great music and it is only half the file size compared to other uncompressed formats.

It is uncompressed
No, it is lossless.

wav?
Have you hust converted to Mac?

Chris is correct. Just to clarify the distinction, Apple Lossless uses a purely mathematical procedure to reduce the bits needed for the signal, without modifying any sonic information. Thus it is compressed but lossless.

Lossy compression techniques, such as mp3 and AAC, use what is called "psychoacoustic" analysis. They actually remove sonic information, with as little impact to the audio as possible, but not zero. Lossy techniques can go to much lower bit rates than can lossless ones, but the lower you go, the more degradation to the signal.

WAV would be a bad choice for iTunes as it does not support embedded album artwork. I therefore also add my vote for using Apple Lossless. AIFF would be as good quality as Apple Lossless and also supports embedded album artwork but takes more disk space than Apple Lossless (also known as ALAC).

Ironically, Apple Lossless now works better in Windows than AIFF 🙂