I asked this question a few months ago in another thread, and I'll ask it again here because I still feel I'm in the monirity and trying to determine if I'm doing something "wrong" by ripping to .wav format:

If your playing through a PC and have a large hard drive, why compress the audio? Hard disk space is so cheap. What's the big deal with all these different compression schemes? Is there something to be gained other than smaller file size?