Sonar's Final Mix and Producer: wav, mp3 or flac?

I realize that not only is this a newbie type question but probably also a question that will cause endless debates and controversy, but I am currently working on a personal project and I want to use Sonar's "Producer" utility. I've transferred a lot of my old 4-track audio cassette songs into Sonar, touched them up a bit (a mix here, a master there, with occasional new drums) and then I am planning to use the Producer utility to put them on a CD. (I've never used that utility before, I usually use Nero)

So with exporting an audio file of the final mix: I kind of know the basic differences between wav, mp3 and flac files, but I'd like some recommendations on which format to use.  I'm leaning towards flac, but I'm wondering if there are any pros or cons for a different format.  

I did a test and exported audio of the same song in the three formats I listed above, and honestly I can't hear much of a difference in quality.  Maybe my ears are getting too old.....

Thanks for any advice or suggestions,
Lee

Hey Bristol, thanks for your reply.  But I have burnt flac files to a CD before and they do play on a CD player. I'm a proud (unashamed) DeadHead and do a lot of tape trading/CD burning and most of the tapers in the later years started using the flac format as their preferred choice, which is why I was thinking of using that format.

20 years from now, an uncompressed format like wav is more likely to be supported than mp3, flac, ogg, etc.  For that reason I always export wav files of the stuff I care about, and back those up.  (I also use an audio editor to trim leading/trailing blank space, normalize, remove pops/clicks from other recordings, and add fades). 

I then generate mp3s from the wavs (using a separate program), and upload the mp3s to my web site.  The wavs are the master files, and the mp3s are derived, so I don't need to backup the mp3s.

A few years ago I used 128 bps mp3s but now I'm using 256.   It was easy to re-generate the mp3s from the wavs; having to re-export from Sonar would have been a lot harder.

hit me up if you wanna trade some shows I have a pretty big collection myself

I give a big +1 to what Tripecac said.  The finished wav's are your master archive.  I have them separated into projects and not only stored on physical DVD's but on two external HD's.  You can take those wav's and convert them to whatever compressed format is necessary at the time.  Final mastered wav's are used to burn CD's while high bitrate MP3's are the default for all the portable players out there be it smartphones, IPods, etc along with posting on websites.  Some sites force you to use lower bitrates but for everything else, use higher ones.  When you're sending compressed files out to different people you want to use what they're most likely to be able to handle and that's MP3.  I've only used flac for sending project files over the internet in a collaboration which I haven't done in a while.  There may be a better way to handle that now.
 
Bob 

Thanks again guys for clearing that up for me.  I guess wav files are the way to go for CD's

I don't do much Dead trading anymore, if I don't have a certain show usually I can find it at
The Internet Archive (way back machine), if you fellow DeadHeads don't know about this site, you MUST check it out!  Not only does it have tons of soundboard and audience shows, it's got a lot of other interesting non-Dead stuff too.  It's one website I could spend years at.