Effect of flac compression on SQ

[brian (Brian Luczkiewicz)]

But with the current technology and equipment (flac is around for quite some years now), I do not think there will be any audible difference between a compressed flac file or the equivalent file in uncompressed wave. At least I do not hear any difference .

I don’t think @Sloop_John_B is suggesting that FLAC files sound differently than WAV files because the data is different–he is concerned about the impact that the work of decoding a FLAC file might have on sound quality.

@Sloop_John_B

Does Roon core do this work before the signal is sent (in my case to squeezebox and airport express) thus allowing compressed flac rips that don’t effect SQ?

For the most part, all of the decoding work happens in the core.

For AirPlay ONLY, we (losslessly) convert to Apple Lossless format before shipping the data to the device. We do this because it is consistent with iTunes behavior, and because our AirPlay implementation would be less reliable than iTunes if we required the (often weak) WiFi chips on those devices to handle 80% more data.

For every other playback mechanism, we send PCM or DSD content directly, so there’s no decoding going on in the endpoint hardware.