Hi Everyone,
I looked for this answer before posting but didn’t find exactly what I was looking for so here goes (!)
I know what file formats Roon supports, I just wanted to ask two questions:
(A) if the Roon platform works better or worse with WAV or AIFF? (And why)
(B) if you were ripping 1,000 CDs from scratch today, without the burden of any prior library, what lossless, uncompressed format would you choose and why?
(I am only interested in lossless uncompressed formats pls)
Thank you!
Why don’t you like compression? (No judgment; I get that storage is cheap today, but so is processing for lossless decompression at the scale that almost any home listening requires). Wondering what benefit you get but not compressing to, say, FLAC. Thanks.
Too many reasons to list, but two good ones are:
(a) in a world of cheap storage, compression makes no sense, and (b) as an engineer, less complexity (usually) leads to superior performance.
I’m only interested in lossless uncompressed. Thx!
That would suggest WAV but don’t forget the tagging ability of WAV is seriously worse then FLAC. For that alone I would use FLAC
I get the simplicity bit but FLAC has years of background of like for like output
Just my 2 p
Both WAV and AIFF have exactly the same ´music´ bits, only the controlling and metadata bits are different.(Wikipedia is your friend).
In the earlier days , wAV did not conrain metadata, today it does (but I do not know if all programs are ready to support this.
AIFF has the same metadata capabilities as FLAC.(Therefor I have been using and still am using AIFF.
Would I have to restart from scratch again, I would most probably choose ´uncompressed’ flac.
This level of compression - ZERO - has been added a number of years ago.
It drlivers the widest accepted music format, best metadata and no compression.
Dirk
Definitely not wav. There are no standards for it’s metadata.
AIFF, due to metadata / tag. The zero level compression FLAC is a good idea too.
Thank you Gentlemen.
This is an excellent solution to a problem that only an audiophile would have with regular, i.e. compressed, flac.
However it is my understanding that metadata can, although it is rare and only happens with most resolving of audio systems, have an affect on the sound of a flac file.
That’s why I try to keep my systems below this level! 
Or your audiophoolness depending on viewpoint of the claim.
And for the same reason I stopped at silver ears! 
The simple answer is no.
If I’m right about which study you referred to, the methodology of that study violated the principle of isolation of DAC from the computer i.e. rule 1 here (even though they were not using Roon, but the principle is the same):
It is a similar thing that some people found GUI-less Roon Server to be better than Roon with GUI for some setups, due to EMI RFI from GPU.
It was meant to be a joke.
Oh wait, I didn’t know that audiophiles had things like “methodology” and “principle(s)”. My understanding is simply that if one hears a difference it must be so regardless of scientific principles. So using a file format which has metadata can adversely effect the sound quality simply because I hear it that way, science be damned! Or to put it another way, using WAV instead of FLAC provides better sound because I hear it that way - and if you don’t hear the difference your audio system isn’t resolving enough or you don’t have golden ears like I do. No need for scientific principles.