ALAC vs FLAC for CD ripping?

But in a different architecture.
With a shared power rail.
You don’t have that.

Hmmm, sounds like you might be making the trip up to Madison occasionally.

Count me in but I need an earwax diddledisquat compensator. I may be able to pay a small deposit in a bluetooth moon. Or 3.5 million random bits to be done with it.

This is extremely easy to answer.
For the purest with plenty of money to spend on hard drive space WAV. Sounds best as it’s original.
For us normal people FLAC is King.
For Apple users AIFF slight loss in quality from the two formats above, but only very slightly.

That’s just not correct. Best? Better than the same file delivered in FLAC? Why would it sound better, it’s the same.

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Wow. There is a lot of misinformation floating around here. AIFF and WAV contain uncompressed PCM. They are different containers. That’s it. There is no loss in quality between WAV and AIFF or FLAC and AIFF!!

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None of these formats should be used
If you love your CD, and you want to archive, rip it there is only
one good format, and that is WAV.
WAV is the original master format of the CD, so no other format is
better.
Harddisks are getting bigger in format size, so it’s no excuse to cripple your music with data reduction and compression,
WAV sounds better than Flac, If you cannot hear the difference it’s time for a better stereo equipment (or maybe wash your ears :slight_smile:
)

No lossless wrapper is worse either. They are the same when unpacked.

I can’t hear a difference and on your say so, £11,000 of Meridian DSP speakers is not good enough, or could it be possible they build them to mitigate the problems, so much of the need for after market gadgetry is removed at source?

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Sigh. More misinformation and speculation and no facts.

Music is stored on a CD in PCM. When CDs are ripped, the PCM data is stored in some container that the computer and the programs that run on it can understand. That might be WAV, FLAC, AIFF, ALAC, etc. All of the lossless containers hold the exact same PCM data. Some compress it while some don’t. There is no loss of data unless you use a lossy compression container.

Uncompressed containers may sound better than compressed containers but I have never heard that with my equipment. I have good equipment and good ears. Use the Roon Core/Roon Endpoint model and there will be no difference.

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:man_facepalming:

/10char

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No. CDs don’t have a file system, so no wav files either. Just PCM data.

Only after CDs were used as storage devices in computers you can see that file systems were added to new disc standard. A file system is used on DVDs.

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Correct PCM format is used in music recording studio’s
99 procent of all recorded music in the world is recorded in the PCM WAV
format, so WAV is has been, en will be…

It its PCM at the DAC. That is WAV if you like. It’s the same. There is no loss in quality. The Wav file is packed away in a little box and delivered for you for self assembly just like an Ikea chair. When assembled, it’s an Ikea chair.

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No, wrong again. It is PCM on the CD. WAV is an uncompressed container for PCM that was created by Microsoft and IBM. It has nothing to do with the Redbook standard.

No, it is not WAV. It is just PCM. WAV is just a container.

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Uncompressed PCM on Windows gets a WAV container, on Mac a AIFF container… the contents is exactly the same. Compress that, “losslessly”, and you end up with a FLAC or perhaps ALAC.

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I have Meridian speakers as well… At home! And a recording studio in London… Its a known fact that CD ripped to WAV sounds best. We send all recorded masters to CD/streaming companies in WAV. then they convert them to whatever format that’s requested, for their clients purposes.

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That’s how the workflow is and it’s fine but Flac does not impede on sound quality. That’s a fact too.

Again, more misinformation. WAV is an uncompressed container for PCM. You could use AIFF or uncompressed FLAC and get exactly the same results. Just because the standard workflow uses WAV does not mean it sounds better than any other uncompressed or lossless compressed container.

I don’t care if you have 7 recording studios. You saying that using AIFF results in a “slight loss in quality” tells us you don’t really know what you are talking about here.

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Its a known fact that CD ripped to WAV sounds best

:confounded:

known” - by whom? Industry professionals I’m guessing?

fact” - given that ‘sound quality’ is accepted by most everyone as being affected by all sorts of psychoacoustic phenomena, I don’t think you can use the word “fact

“In the opinion of numerous music industry professionals, myself included, CDs ripped to WAV sound better” is a perfectly acceptable comment

IMHO yours, as stated, is not

I can say, however, that from the position of IT technology, a WAV compressed to FLAC/ALAC and then uncompresssed back to WAV is bit identical to the original WAV. Hence, I cannot see how they might sound different, unless we are postulating some errors in the compression/decompression process when applied to Roon/RAAT/Endpoints (which in any case would manifest as clicks or dropouts, not subtle ‘quality’ changes)

Hurrah for sunny afternoons in lockdown :rofl: :rofl:

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