Roxio on Toast vs iTunes & Disc Burner

Roxio has a web page titled: Toast, iTunes, Disc Burner, and iDVD Frequently-Asked Questions. In general, it offers reasons why you may want/need Toast, even if you have iTunes, Disc Burner and iDVD. Of particular interest is this item:

Q. Does the quality of audio on a CD burned by Toast differ from a CD burned by iTunes?
A. Yes. Here is one example: Toast will make a backup copy of a store-bought CD without any loss of quality. A CD copied using Toast will sound just as good as the original. However, copying a CD using iTunes produces significantly different results. iTunes will first encode the songs into MP3 format, then convert them into AIFF, and then burn them to CD.  Because of the conversion to MP3 (even at 320 kbps) and back to AIFF, the quality of the sound will be noticeably degraded.

A reader points out that iTunes has a Preference setting to switch from importing via MP3 Encoder to AIFF Encoder and queries whether this contradicts Roxio's assertion. We are not sure. Update: Ofir Gal and Pierre Igot agree with the reader on this one.

The web page also describes the conflicts between Toast and iTunes/Disc Burner extensions, mentioning that they should be fixed in Toast 5.0.1 - which is now out. [See also our previous coverage.]