[Willanhanyard]

I am kind of getting into current day pop music, and I am looking at buying some CD's. My question is if the music on the CD's now is just burned from a lower quality file like MP3, and not a loseless codec.
 
Sorry if I put this in the wrong section, but I am somewhat new

 

[Jmstrmbn]

Good Question I'm also curious.

 

[OJNeg]

I couldn't tell you for sure. The standard process is to take the studio master and simply downsample to 16/44.1. I doubt that they would go to the extra trouble to downsample, compress to MP3, and then convert back to WAV format.
 
As for the actual quality of a modern pop music mastering, you'll find that it sucks. Dynamic range compression destroys audio more than any sort of MP3 compression can.
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_range_compression

 

[bigshot]

CDs are by definition lossless.