Conversion or up-sampling during audio playback is hardly a performance issue with new machines. Yes, new machines are capable of high quality playback but will still play your lesser quality files as they are. The same way a USB 3.0 drive can run the faster format and still support the slower 2.0 devices. But not everybody can afford to upgrade all of their devices.
Now, if quality is what concerns you (and it should), let's talk about that. Quality has been a tricky thing since recorded music began. The original live sound from the master board or multi track to a platter is the starting point. Ideally, you want your record, CD, tape or digital file to be as close to that original source as possible. Licensing music for compilations and big company buyouts, resulted in copies of copies and poor production for capital gain. Convenience and portability offerings resulted in sub standard media and components. When the dust settled, we got CDs.
CDs were great at first. Artists and labels wanted to resurrect that original sound and went back to the source to get it or tweak it. But eventually, CDs suffered the same quality woes as records. The people got a taste condensed, portable entertainment and it wasn't slowing down. Personal computers gave us a way to store our music digitally via WAV files. A near perfect alternative to CD audio. However, they required more storage space than PCs could provide at the time.
Meet the MP3. The compressed, less clunky version of a WAV file. Now instead of swapping the CD every 15-20 songs, you could have 100s playing continuously. Although CDs were/are of superior to mp3, no one cared. They just loved having more options. So did we as DJs. We were slower to make the transition, but we did it. We've compromised quality for convenience when we ripped our CD libraries to mp3.
The good news is that the differences are most often barely noticeable to our ears (if the source is good). You can squeak out some more quality by ripping your CDs to flac or wav format (which we now have lots of room for). Again, if the source audio from the CD isn't its best, you are only making a copy of a bad copy.
WOW! That was a lot of blabbering! If you're still with me, here's my bottom line advice. Stay digital, but do your homework going forward to find the best quality audio files you can. Don't kill yourself trying to revamp your entire library at once. If you notice a bad track, replace it. In your spare time, take a genre at time and replace your strongest tracks. We're likely never going to be completely satisfied anyway and something new is sure to be coming down the line.
Remember, we're lucky to be working by doing something we love. We'll never be perfect, but that's perfectly fine. Cheers!
