File format

[Qwin]

all files ive ever bought i took on flac. used to buy a few from qobuz

Me to Grant, I decided early on to stick to Flac.
I don't know about the other formats, but I like the way Flac files carry the album art imbedded for thumbnails etc. and not as separate images.

[Patrick Dixon]

it's the exact same data in both so the idea that they are different, let alone audibly different, is far-fetched.

Absolutely correct. FLAC can be decompressed to produce a bit-identical file to the original.

Me to Grant, I decided early on to stick to Flac.
I don't know about the other formats, but I like the way Flac files carry the album art imbedded for thumbnails etc. and not as separate images.

WAV only holds the 'raw' audio data whereas most other audio file formats (inc MP3, FLAC) also contain metadata tags.

[Gazjam]

Ripped most of my CDs to AIFF Apple Lossless here.
Experimented with Wav, Flac all the usual suspects.

Found that there was less cpu “effort” in decompressing the AIFF file compared to Flac before it hit the Dac.
I found THAT could be one of the sources of files sounding different.
Did a deep dive on this stuff back in the day when setting up my Music Server, there’s a lot of factors at play potentially.

Just depends how deep down the rabbit hole you want to go.

Ripping to Flac is absolutely fine though, it’s great.
a difference not really worth caring about, especially if you use lowest Flac compression levels when ripping.
Storage space isn’t really an issue nowadays after all.

[Macca]

neither is CPU power

[Gazjam]

Your not wrong!

In this case though, less can be better.
comes down to noise again?

I always underclocked the CPU on server builds.
Sounded better that way to me.

[Macca]

noise transfer is a possibility. but it's not a given. Heard some very good sounds from just a laptop plugged into a DAC, nothing fancy added or done.

I've never liked the idea of using a computer as a source though.

[Gazjam]

Computers are noisy environments yeah,
can mitigate some but not all of the noise issues.

Good digital doesn’t need to be over complicated or expensive nowadays.
GREAT digital… sometimes it can be ‘pay to play’, though I’ve heard very spendy digital gear I never liked.
Naim Dac for instance, oh dear.
Needed the add on psu to make it sound like music.

Its a funny old game.