WAV vs FLAC

Mike

Mike

Audioshark
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Did anyone read the WAV vs FLAC study in the Dec TAS? Very interesting. Does this mean rip to WAV (and use up gigabytes like crazy) or return....GASP....to spinners?

Thoughts? What did you make of that article?


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No, it's in the magazine and they typically don't post articles for a few months after the magazine has been out.


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I just read the article (I get the download version of TAS). These are the same folks who wrote a series of articles for TAS a couple of years ago on quantifying sound quality of digital that was controversial. They basically do listening tests, which they numerically grade. They try to be reasonably scientific in their approach, but clearly it is not something that a peer reviewed scientific journal would publish. They have a strong correlation between their listening scores and the amount of FLAC compression FLAC 0 to 8, with the wav file the best and least (not) compressed. They recommend keeping a wav file for the most critical listening. What they don't do, or I may have missed it, is compare the wav file to the uncompressed FLAC file (not FLAC 0) which is actually a bit larger than the wav file, since it also contains metadata that the wav file does not. The uncompressed FLAC is a relatively recent addition to dbpoweramp, so it may not have been there when they did the work in the article. My experience is that uncompressed FLAC is the same as wav, except it has the advantage of metadata tags. I do my CD's in uncompressed FLAC, since storage is no longer the issue for me (an uncompressed CD costs about 3.5 cents for storage in a 4TB external drive, so I can afford to have several backups in addition to the working file).

Larry
 
Thanks Larry. Good point about the FLAC 0.


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Another advantage of FLAC 0 is, it is a more stable format in time because it not only has metadata, but also checksums that allow the computer to verify its integrity every time it is copied. Ripping or converting to FLAC0 (or AIFF in the Mac environment) seems like the ideal solution so far.

But I haven't read the article.
 
Really these articles, both the current ones and the previous ones, should never have been published; in fact they were submitted to and rejected by Stereophile prior to their publication in TAS. Before I get into specifics, though, I would make this suggestion; store your music files as FLAC at any compression you want, and when you want to play them decode them to WAV, load into RAM and play from there. It takes the same amount of time to decode FLAC to WAV and load into memory as it does to load a WAV file into memory from a hard drive.
 
rbbert said:
Really these articles, both the current ones and the previous ones, should never have been published; in fact they were submitted to and rejected by Stereophile prior to their publication in TAS. Before I get into specifics, though, I would make this suggestion; store your music files as FLAC at any compression you want, and when you want to play them decode them to WAV, load into RAM and play from there. It takes the same amount of time to decode FLAC to WAV and load into memory as it does to load a WAV file into memory from a hard drive.
Click to expand...

Good post Rbbert, especially the last part. I have numerous high res. recordings, some in FLAC, some in WAV and some in both. After having done a number of head to head comparisons, I'll only purchase high res. WAV files now. I hear a material difference in soundstage depth and nuance with the high res. WAV compared to high res. FLAC. But if you can convert from FLAC to WAV before you play, then go for it!

Ken
 
So "Dr." Zellig claims that each WAV > FLAC > WAV conversion permanently degrades sound quality even though FLAC includes a checksum which will not allow the file to be decoded unless the WAV checksums before and after conversion match. I and others have done 1000 WAV > FLAC > WAV conversions (running a batch file) and you end up with identical WAV files (checked bit-for-bit using any software you want). This end result is the same as when you copy a computer file (a WAV file ar anything else) from one drive to another, or into an audio workstation and then back out again, or any number of other computer manipulation of a file that occurs many times a day in everyone's computers (or a bank's computers, or our armed forces nuclear control computers, etc); when two computers are bit-for-bit identical, they are
the same file as far as the computer is concerned.

now when a computer file is played, then any number of things may be different depending on the location of the file, its level of compression, what programs are used for playing and/or manipulation, etc. Loading the file as a wav file into RAM will remove most of those variables in the computer but then you stil have the cable and DAC which can introduce timing errors, noise, etc, but those have nothing to do with WAV vs. FLAC.
 
Alpinist said:
Good post Rbbert, especially the last part. I have numerous high res. recordings, some in FLAC, some in WAV and some in both. After having done a number of head to head comparisons, I'll only purchase high res. WAV files now. I hear a material difference in soundstage depth and nuance with the high res. WAV compared to high res. FLAC. But if you can convert from FLAC to WAV before you play, then go for it!

Ken
Click to expand...

Ken, I am guessing that your FLAC recordings are not uncompressed - since I haven't ever seen uncompressed FLAC files for sale. What I do with FLAC files is convert them to uncompressed FLAC. I don't hear any difference between uncompressed FLAC and wav, and the uncompressed FLAC for me has the great advantage of having metadata that the wav files don't have. I don't use iTunes, so the transportability of the metadata is important to me.

Larry
 
Certainly the head of Berkeley audio labs feels wav is sonically the best albeit perhaps not the most practical . I do value his view and level of expertise. Not sure my ears are as sensitive to the incremental upgrade.

Nick
 
Since most experienced users of computer audio prefer playback from RAM (or at least an SSD) to typical hard drive playback, one can take advantage of the storage and metadata convenience of FLAC and the (perhaps) sonic advantages of wav by decoding FLAC to wav into memory and playing from there (as I posted earlier).
 
Hmm, have to look into Flac0. I never did wav because you can't (or difficult to) inject meta data into them.

Thx for the tip, Larry!
 
Allen, Remember, it is uncompressed FLAC, not FLAC0 which is still compressed. Larry

socfan12 said:
Hmm, have to look into Flac0. I never did wav because you can't (or difficult to) inject meta data into them.

Thx for the tip, Larry!
Click to expand...
 
Rbbert, I am intrigued about doing the automatic conversion from FLAC to wav for my RAM buffer, so I can keeping the metadata to view. I don't do iTunes, but just use A+ (on my Mac mini). If you can, could you point me to the A+ control that does the conversion to wav? I don't see it in A+ preferences. Right now, I just play the FLAC file and it just goes onto the RAM buffer before playing. Thanks, Larry

rbbert said:
Since most experienced users of computer audio prefer playback from RAM (or at least an SSD) to typical hard drive playback, one can take advantage of the storage and metadata convenience of FLAC and the (perhaps) sonic advantages of wav by decoding FLAC to wav into memory and playing from there (as I posted earlier).
Click to expand...
 
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