Which codec is best for lossless ripping?

[MajorFubar]

I didn't intend to flame or insult, and if I came across that way, then sorry.

But the HiFi scene is so full of snake-oil it's untrue, and anyone who comes along and shouts "the emperor is naked" is called narrow-minded and has set agendas. Perhaps I'm being unfair because I have no experience of Linn's or other manufacturer's forums, but my possibly wrong opinion is that a manufacturer's forum is probably the last place I'd head if I wanted to steer clear of marketing bull**** dressed-up as pseudo-science.

Digital is not like analogue. It's quantifiable, measurable and exact. Bits are bits and bytes are bytes. Perhaps an engineer can explain in easy-to-understand language how the stream of bits have been corrupted/compromised on their way to the DAC purely because they've been extracted from a losslessly-compressed file which potentially put slightly extra strain on the processor. But until then I'll carry on using ALAC, happy in the knowledge that I have proved in my own tests that FLAC/ALAC uncompress to recreate the WAV with such absolute accuracy that the two waveforms mathematically cancel each other out when you invert one file's phase. But in the meantime, one thing I won't accept is someone hinting that if I can't hear the difference then it's just because my HiFi's rubbish.

 

[AnotherJoe]

A FLAC codec is a repeatable software process that takes a PCM input and coverts it into a losslessly compressed container (and vice versa)

For a given input the result will always be the same. There will be no discrepancies. The same goes for ALAC.

You will always have exactly the same PCM stream going into the DAC, regardless of whether you use WAV,ALAC,FLAC.

If Linn are suggesting otherwise then they are purporting that the FLAC/ALAC codecs are not lossless, which is of course not true.

 

[TimothyRias]

Also, being a fairly regular follower of the Naim forums, you'll find a few owners who store their audio as FLAC on NAS drives but let the media server software decode to WAV before reaching the streamers, as they found they prefer the sound of WAV. And these are not lunatics.

They may not be lunatics, but objective evidence strongly suggests that they are deluding themselves. WAV and FLAC will "sound" exactly the same. At best, (as noted above) playing back WAV or FLAC will produce different electronic noise patterns, but its is very important to noted that this noise has essentially no correlation with the sounds/music being played back. Instead it would manifest as a hiss or buzz. (And as noted above, if any effect exists it is very debatable whether it is stronger for WAV of F/ALAC.)

 

[fr0g]

dbPoweramp can rip multiple copies at the same time.

Just look for the multirip plugin.

I do a FLAC and an MP3 at the same time.

And for the moomins saying WAV sounds different than FLAC (or ALAC). Go back under the silly foo-rock you came from. The same file exactly is played back. If there is ANY difference in sound then you are either imagining it or your equipment is faulty.