Quote Originally Posted by Gazjam View Post
Yup, I know Flac is lossless and theres checksums and all that good stuff to ensure the original signal is outputted, but its the extra CPU load when uncompressing Flac back to PCM than can have an impact.
I've found that even with a powerful PC where you'd think this kind of thing would not matter it does.
My experience is the opposite. The 'extra load' is fairly trivial. Try using Task Manager in Windows and go the processes tab. Foobar shows 0% process being used when playing Flac. Of course it is not 0% because it is rounded to the nearest percent. So it will use less than half a percent of the CPUs resources. So if Flac is < 1% it is not taxing the system at all. I've just done this on my office PC that has an AMD Phenom II X4 945 processor running at 3.0GHz and 8Gb of ram running at 1600MHz. (My Flac server has an Intel i7-3770S 3.1GHz processor with 16 Gb of ram running at 1866Mhz.) With a modern multi-core processor I would not expect a difference to be heard because the extra 'load' is likely done simultaneously.

I think of it like a car that cruises at 100 km per hour. Throw some bricks in the back and you will still travel at 100 km per hour. You will use a small amount of extra petrol for the trip but you wont notice anything different.