Larry,
I am also new to this site but have been using PC's and Mac's for audio playback for 5 years now. i have alot of time and money invested in this medium and IMO the Mac is superior to the PC in alot of ways. I have also compared AIFF to ALAC and can hear no difference. In the end storage being cheap and being that you are going to rip from CD I would go AIFF. I have over 1800 CD's ripped in apple lossless and listen to them through a Mac pro connected to a Benchmark DAC1 usb with a Ridgestreet Audio Poiema usb cable. The rest of my system consists of Ayre MXR mono's and K5 preamp with Dynaudio C2 speakers. I can say that if there was a difference in these two codecs I would be able to hear it with my rig and I cannot.
Hope this helps.
