It's down to licensing.
Apple are a shit company to deal with, and expect every company that wants decode and play back their proprietary format (ie ALAC, or Apple Lossless) to pay as license fee, and quite a hefty one at that.
Which is a bit rich, because just about all the other audio codecs are out in the public domain.
All the other manufacturers have told Apple to go f**k themselves, and each one of them has reverse engineered the Apple codec, but in order for the various players to handle the audio stream it needs to be converted to be FLAC, WAV or whatever their player can handle natively.

Most every player out there handles WAV natively.
Same with FLAC.
What you have been listening to with your ALAC files is the result of ALAC being read, converted on the fly to a format that can be handled, then read by a player and unpacked and played.
What you have now is the stream being read and played. It will be the same with native FLAC files.e

You could have stopped after the first five words, but agreed, they love their proprietary formats and are very difficult if anything goes against their we-know-best philosophy.

It's one of the things I find makes their machines more reliable than some PCs. Although it's also one of the reasons why they are impractical to use on a conventional business network.

Interesting - I just tried dbpoweramp for the first time - seem to remember @tonyc recommending this to me a while back, I usually use iTunes to import albums.

I imported a CD I knew well and find a little over bright (Ed Sheeran - Divide) in WAV format and have just had a listen.

Wow is all I can say, the difference between it and the iTunes encoded Applelossless version (played back as WAV via Asset UPnP) and this dbpoweramp version is amazing.

It seriously sounds like I have lifted a rather large curtain away from the speakers, but additionally taken a lot of the harshness that used to bother me away. The bass it tighter, the sound stage is wider and possibly deeper, and overall it is a lot sweeter sounding.

I don't get it, how can a encoding/importing product make that much difference?

Interesting, so the main question is, should I be creating WAV or FLAC files or does it not make any difference?

I have seen the option for secure rips, what does that give you over the default settings?

Thanks for explaining further Strat, interesting regarding the meta data element, when I create in WAVE (WAV?) format, I can add the usual info, i.e. Artist, Album name etc. and assumed that meant I was creating meta data, am I incorrect?. Would you recommend creating FLAC then? Just a little concerned that the sound will reduce... I've been super impressed with the improvemen since moving to WAVE via DbPoweramp as opposed to ALAC and iTunes.

I have set it to secure ripping, which like you said was an easy configuration change, I like the idea of it.

Another question, does DbPoweramp get rid of the breaks (2secs?) between each track, as that's really annoying on some albums.

Thanks Strat, so that is what I shall do, I am going to use FLAC - I certainly prefer the sound to ALAC via iTunes

Thanks for all of the guidance, this streaming thing is a lot more complicated that I gave it credit!

Paul.

I've just checked my setup, and it's not ticked.
The audio has already been verified during the ripping process.

The big thing about streaming is that it pays to do some homework before you start, as it can save you time and effort later on.
The approach I take is to set things to operate on as wide a range of players as possible, which saves altering things for specific players.
When you posted about using dBPoweramp my initial thought was that you've taken a major step in the right direction - it's great software, and it does what it says on the tin.
Something you could set up with your rips is Replaygain - you DO NOT need to bother with Replaygain Apply, as it will irrevocably alter the files.
Replaygain is just a set of tags popped into the folder, and although you may not use Replaygain at the moment you may do in the future. It's easier to start as you mean to go on.
I use Replaygain on my Squeezebox setup - it stops those heart stopping moments when the next album has a much higher volume level than the previous one.
I also do quite a bit of headphone listening, especially late at night, and it saves my lugholes getting a battering.

The next bit for you is to get to grips with editing metadata - the online databases are not written by record companies, so there are all sorts of anomalies to be found, what with smelling pistakes and what have you. If the record company has been involved the data is usually worse.

I use Mp3Tag for editing metadata, but I'm using a Windoze PC.
There will be some kind of editing tool for MacOS.

A CD player can't handle anything to do with Replaygain (it's incapable of reading the information), so you're left with the low volume/blasting volume scenario.
Quite a lot of CDs will be somewhere in between the two volume extremes.