With CDA, when is exact copying exact?

[SkyLands]

Hard drive storage is big and cheap. Audio cards have Burr Brown DACs. Motherboards are available with tube-based audio buffers. Seem like the perfect time to build an audiophile-grade server for CD music? I thought so too until I looked at the software available for copying the content onto the hard drive...

CD files are in CDA format and I have yet to come across a program that copies CDA file to a hard drive as CDA files - there always seems to a conversion to another format, such as WMA. Are any of these formats just another name for the CDA format, or content which is a binary duplicate of the original with modified headers or wrappers?

What I am trying to avoid is any form of file content "processing," even when it is claimed that the end result performs something as seemingly innocuous as lossless compression.

[RJW1138]

Use EAC (Exact Audio Copy - freeware) to create a bit-perfect digital audio extract. You can save the output either as one large .WAV file with the table of contents info (track info) in a .CUE file, or as one .WAV file per track.

There is no such thing as a .CDA file outside the context of a CD. It's gotta be a .WAV.

Of course, from there, you can look into lossless compression codecs to reduce the size of your music collection on disk. I haven't gotten into this though, and I understand there are several competing ones about...

Ayways, have fun!