I dont think different music containers (wav, aiff or whatever) will make any difference. Its all the same file. It could make a difference in how the file is handled by a program though.
Ultimately i dont think thats the problem, its the output from the computer thats the problem. If you use a soundcard, its inside a very 'noisy' case and will always be hurt by this. Also there are very few very high quality soundcards becasue its a very small market once you get to 'audiophile' country that want to use a computer.
Now some one could play with building a box that can take the usb signal and turn it into coax that is then fed into your dac. This way you can control how the signal is handled, ie. clean power, processing etc well past my knowledge though.
I thought you could take the i2s signal strait from a device like the squeezebox into the chip of the dac, this way quality of the transport/signal would less rely on the quality of the component (squeezebox). But i want to start a diff thread about this.
The way i use my music i couldnt have a cd player, i have friends come over and plug a playlist into the squeezebox and have exactly what we want all night. Poor neighbours.
So im on a mission to get a transport that is as good as a cd player but uses my computer.
question: how much would output quality of the signal from a good cd player and bad cd player be if the pure signal (i2s) is taken and used? Would it be reliant on power quality?