Topic: Uncompressed flac vs wav

[sebas74]

still sticking with CD which is WAV...

[Boxerfan88]

I think the theory is that it is a compacted file, and processor power is required to unpack the file prior to playback (probably in RAM). The same goes for ALAC vs. AIFF.

Ah so. Therefore not content format per se; its player implementation.

If a player unzip the entire file back to WAV in RAM before streaming then there will be no sonic difference.

If a player concurrently unzip and stream block by block, I can see the possibility of CPU cycles disturbing the two concurrent thread.

Interesting...


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[nut]

I am still using my old Squeezebox Touch from years ago, and all my music is kept in FLAC format.  The LMS is residing in my i7 desktop PC, and streaming via LAN connection and via a Gbit switch next to the Squeezebox Touch.  External DAC is used.

I tried streaming in native FLAC format and using the LMS to convert the file to PCM before streaming to compare, they do sound very different.  I prefer PCM streaming.
As ootg and Boxerfan88 mentioned, the important point is where you 'decompress' the lossless file and nothing to do with the file format.  There maybe some streamer that can accept the native FLAC file and decompress it without affecting the sound, it all depends on how they implement it.  I think my Squeezebox Touch processor is rather slow and weak.

Streaming via wired or wireless also can make the sound different.  In most cases, wireless streaming sound worse due to the streamers need to work harder.

[tane0019]

See: http://wavmetadata.blogspot.sg/

mainly software used in win, mac or linux base computer system.
something like you have to make use of the same software to tag & play the wav file.

[Jagdpanzer]

The obvious choice is wav..unfortunately many ripped them in flac or AIFF for easy meta data access. Forget about the tons of arguments forums on wav vs flac.

[thecremonese]

With the dacs pre 2014, the differences are apparent. I challenge anyone in a blind test to discern now. In a blind test, mp3s are almost as good as wav. shall we conduct these?

[ootg]

With the dacs pre 2014, the differences are apparent. I challenge anyone in a blind test to discern now. In a blind test, mp3s are almost as good as wav. shall we conduct these?

May I know what differentiates pre-2014 DACs from the post-2014 DACs? And what kind of mp3s are you referring to? 128kbps? 256kbps or 320 kbps?