Question about difference between direct capture and sound card recording

[jimdagys]

If I capture directly a 128kbps audio stream and listen to this on my mp3 player, how will this compare in sound quality if I instead use a software recorder (like Total Recorder) and record the same stream to 128kbps and listen to this on my mp3 player?

[guns1inger]

You probably won't be able to tell the difference at 128 kbps most of the time. However if you can grab the original stream, why put something in between ?

[Gavino]

Doesn't Total Recorder record the digital input to the sound card (by acting as a pseudo-device)?
In which case, there is no D->A->D conversion involved, although I suppose there might be re-encoding.

[jimdagys]

Well, I want to grab the original audio stream, but nobody on this site answered my first question (previous post), which I will repeat.
There is this website:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00llrks/episodes/2009
They've got a LOT of good stuff to listen to. You can choose low or high bandwidth audio. If I choose low bandwidth audio, it is no problem to capture with Orbit. But if you choose high bandwidth, I can't find any way to capture the stream. The stream plays fine, I just can't figure out how to capture it. If you would take a look and see if you can capture the high bandwidth audio stream, that would be real great for me and a lot of other people.