Thanks Larry. An enjoyable and complete read.
WAV, which is also losless, no different either.
Pain in the ass, though. Can’t be tagged with the file which means unless you use proprietary software and stick with it forever, every time you swap library managers your tags go pop. Also, pointtlessly takes up 2x space of the compressed formats.
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and you’ve no way of testing their integrity.
Just when someone seems about to establish a good point, they throw in something that shows they may not really understand the digital chain enough to maintain the credibility of their argument.
There was a series of articles about digital sound in The Absolute Sound about 4 years ago that really gave me some heartburn, including some Absolute Drivel about the degeneration of sound quality resulting from successive conversions of music from wave to FLAC and back. This reminds me a little of that debate: some actual logic unfortunately adulterated with digital superstition.
OK, to get to the point, unless your DAC is more than a DAC, the format you use to store your music is not relevant to the DAC’s age or modernity Your computer or other playback device feeds your DAC the same format of signal no matter what. That is not to say an MP3 would sound the same as a wave file - just meaning that if a wave file sounds different from a FLAC file – i.e two formats that are decoded to the identical bitstream, it’s not the DAC that’s doing it.
I do allow for the possibility that the additional activity involved in decoding a FLAC or other compressed format to the wave bitstream does affect sound quality IF OUTPUT TO A DAC ATTACHED TO THE SAME MACHINE because there may be some additional EMF or interference thrown off by the CPU in that case. BUT, when you use Roon to send that stream via network to a Roonbridge or other Roon endpoint, that possibility is eliminated. Thus, rather than worry about lossless storage formats that can affect quality, use a core->endpoint network topology that literally eliminates any chance of the lossless storage format making any difference to sound quality.
Anyone that claims they can hear a difference between AIFF, WAVE, ALAC, and FLAC has not configured the system correctly to eliminate the difference. Or it’s expectation bias.
Sorry if I seem grumpy - I’m still on my first cup of coffee this morning. But literally, these arguments are all over the web, and it makes no sense - if you have your playback chain set up correctly, all lossless storage formats are equal in terms of SQ.
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Brilliant ! Thanks for clarifying.
pj
Or, would others disagree -always mind the source.
pj
Don’t be so sure. A few more successive cups may be in order.
pj
I use aiff when ripping cd into my library
No compression enabled and native bit rate
For me flac rounds the sound a bit even if I disable any compression.
I have tried this method on many dacs and software to rip.
Also wav seems better than flac.