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is there any difference between WAV or FLAC formats? we'll as a Audio Master there's a difference between lossless formats, obviously the bigger size, the better quality. right! but i tested between WAV and FLAC format, i distinguished the difference of their quality. although both lossless. but WAV is clearer sound while FLAC is slightly clear sound. that's why i rerip all my Cd's as WAV format instead of WAV.
Infiniteloop
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- Jul 23, 2010
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Lossless is lossless, is lossless. Format is irrelevant, and cannot sound any different. FLAC is more convenient as the file sizes are smaller. You've got more chance of hearing a difference between 16/44 and 24/192 hi res, and most people are concluding there isn't much, if any really noticeable difference. In fact, most of us would probably not be able to consistently distinguish between 320kbs Spotify track and CDA.
Infiniteloop
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Infiniteloop said:
AIFF isn't 'native'; like WAV, it's just a way of storing the PCM bitstream of an audio file on a computer or wherever
Infiniteloop
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Infiniteloop said:
No, they're in PCM format.
It's just that if you're using a Mac computer, it sees them as AIFF files, as that's how it will store them, and the same with WAV on a Windows PC.
To complicate matters slightly further, the PCM sample data isn't stored as WAV on a CD. The sample data is interleaved with error correction bits, and then spread around the disc to give some resistance to dropouts caused by scratches and disc imperfections. Google 'reed solomon encoding' if you are keen to know more. When the disc is played, the CD player reassembles the 16 bit samples before sending to the DAC (either internal or external).
The 'file format' is irrelevant. The only question is whether the codec (coding / decoding process) is lossless - FLAC, WAV, AIFF or lossy MP3, Ogg Vorbis etc.
The 'file format' is irrelevant. The only question is whether the codec (coding / decoding process) is lossless - FLAC, WAV, AIFF or lossy MP3, Ogg Vorbis etc.
andyjm said:
Good point. That's exactly why ripping CDs with error correction is very important to get the best quality rip. The interesting thing is that I have found that error ripped files that I saved as ALACs and play back via Airplay through the DACMagic sound marginally better than when I play back the same CD via the same DAC.
steve_1979
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andyjm said:
I think I get the basic gist of how this work but it seems very complicated to the thickos amongst us (i.e. me).
What I did recently was rip the whole CD as a cue+wav image, and then rip the image to individual flac files(tracks). You'd need backups anyway, so having 2 versions of each CD actually made sense to me. Besides, individual wav files don't show you track info so ripping individual tracks as wav files isn't recommended. As for sound quality, I suspect the flac plugin in foobar does something to change the sound a little bit, but it's basically the same.
Some people just don't get the concept of lossless compression. They can happily accept that if they ZIP an (e.g.) Excel file at work, emai it to their workmate and their workmate unZIPs it, their workmate has an identical copy of their original Excel file. But talk to them about lossless compression of an audio file using a compression algorythm like FLAC, which is essentially like ZIP but tailored to be space-efficient with audio files not Excel files, somehow they doubt you. I know this because I've actually had this debate with someone I work with. It's bizarre.
minjuh1 said:
It shouldn't do. Foobar and J River are both designed to stream bit perfect data to the external device. So, you can use any PC with Foobar, and using the same setting should sound indentical into the same DAC and analogue system. Bit perfect is just that, a completely unchanged data stream.
manicm said:
According to this article, there are very good (legal) reasons for Apple not to support FLAC and to introduce their own lossless codec in 2004. Apple made it open source in 2011.
http://www.mcelhearn.com/why-itunes-doesnt-support-flac-files/
For me it's never been a problem. The couple of dozen FLAC files I have, I have converted into ALAC so they play nice in the iTunes library. ALAC has become our baseline codec. We have ripped all our CDs in ALAC and I record my LPs in 16/44.1 ALAC in Vinyl Studio. The Airport Express uses ALAC to stream audio. It all works seamlessly together.
You could even do this in a Windows environment but I hear from many people that iTunes for Windows is not the best computing experience. 🙂
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