What he means is that you'll lose less quality by going through the .wav than by transcoding them straight from m4a to mp3. Whether this is accurate or not and whether just transcoding them would get rid of the drm I do not know.
No, you'll lose the same amount of quality either way. Going through .wav is just the long way around compared to transcoding.
What I meant when I mentioned burning them to disc doesn't lose quality is that when you burn to audio disc, you burn the decompressed files, so your burned disc will sound just as good as your m4as. When you transcode, they'll be uncompressed and then compressed
again, using a lossy format (in all likelyhood).
m4a is a lossy format, that means when your original recording is converted to m4a, you lose some information, permanently.
When you transcode, you are decompressing the m4a (which has already permanently lost information), and recompressing into a different format. If you recompress into another lossy format, you lose even more information. If you recompress to .wav or another lossless format, you don't lose any further information, but your file will be huge compared to a lossy version.
This is why programs like the one I linked to in a previous post are better than transcoding. Those programs just remove the DRM and do not recompress the file.
