<sigh> Digital to Analogue

[StanleyB]

I am a long way from being convinced that there are any issues whatsoever getting the same bits out of a flac.

Stereophile's recent article suggested that wav to flac to wav conversion sounded inferior to the orginal wav file, which is absolutely bonkers. I think that a lot of the audiophile press don't really understand the technology and their brains are stuck in analogue thinking.

I have been saying for some time now that FLAC sounds different/is less detailed than WAV. I tried different codecs/computers/etc. But it didn't change my opinion.
Of course, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but referring to someone of a different opinion as bonkers has not stopped new inventions and development in technology .

[Vincent Kars]

The claim made in an article in TAS is that conversion from WAV1 > FLAC > WAV2 yields a WAV2 sounding inferior to WAV1.
In other words converting to FLAC corrupts the sound quality permanently.
This not about differences between WAV and FLAC but about converting from a lossless format to another lossless format resulting in permanent degradation in sound quality.

AlexM is two times wrong.
1 - It is TAS not Stereophile (they refused the article)
2 – Bonkers is ways to optimistic.

[bobbasrah]

The claim made in an article in TAS is that conversion from WAV1 > FLAC > WAV2 yields a WAV2 sounding inferior to WAV1.
In other words converting to FLAC corrupts the sound quality permanently.
This not about differences between WAV and FLAC but about converting from a lossless format to another lossless format resulting in permanent degradation in sound quality.

AlexM is two times wrong.
1 - It is TAS not Stereophile (they refused the article)
2 – Bonkers is ways to optimistic.

Any advance on bonkers, or should that be a new thread ?

[StanleyB]

Of course, calling FLAC lossless is really stretching the truth. Maybe by as much as 50%.
WAV in itself is not lossless. Powerful error correction techniques are required to correct for the losses in the extracted WAV data from a CD. But the facts are often discarded in favour of dodgy sound bites.

[Clive]

I'd really love to know why it is thought that playback of samples from an area of menory is superior to playback from disk, which is actually also playback from memory. I am waiting for someone to say that playback from processor cache is better than playback from main memory

It's because the in-memory player is stopping lots of other windows processes working so they don't interrupt the music creating jitter / latency.

[AlexM]

The claim made in an article in TAS is that conversion from WAV1 > FLAC > WAV2 yields a WAV2 sounding inferior to WAV1.
In other words converting to FLAC corrupts the sound quality permanently.
This not about differences between WAV and FLAC but about converting from a lossless format to another lossless format resulting in permanent degradation in sound quality.

AlexM is two times wrong.
1 - It is TAS not Stereophile (they refused the article)
2 – Bonkers is ways to optimistic.

Vincent,

Thank you for the corrections - correct on both counts!. The process of converting wavs to flac and back again is most definately lossless, and is is provable and not really debatable.

Stan, I know quite well how a cd is read, and how error correction works. In this instance we are talking about comparing a PCM data set created from the same source data in a WAV file, and the same data in a FLAC file. What I am saying is that both a wav file and a flac are both containers for PCM data. One is packed and one is not, but they contain EXACTLY the same data.

My point is any differences come in how the playout is implemented, not from the file format. This is why I call the TAS article bonkers.

Hope this clears up who I was being insulting to and why

Cheers,
Alex

[AlexM]

Of course, calling FLAC lossless is really stretching the truth. Maybe by as much as 50%.
WAV in itself is not lossless. Powerful error correction techniques are required to correct for the losses in the extracted WAV data from a CD. But the facts are often discarded in favour of dodgy sound bites.

Stan,

Not sure what you are driving at here - can you expand?.

Regards,
Alex

[StanleyB]

What's the physical size of a FLAC file compared to its WAV equivalent? 50%? So 50% of info has vanished somehow, but the format is still considered lossless .

[bobbasrah]

What's the physical size of a FLAC file compared to its WAV equivalent? 50%? So 50% of info has vanished somehow, but the format is still considered lossless .

This cannot be serious

[StanleyB]

Why not? So many are avoiding to face the elephant in the room, but it can't be ignored forever. At 24/96 and 24/192 these minor things become major issues.