As far as the psychology is concerned, it may help not to use the word "compressed" in thinking about, say, FLAC vs. WAV. Rather, they are different representations of the same information. (Actually, as has been pointed out, FLAC has _more_ information, considering the tags.)
Would you rather the same number were represented as: a. One thousand twenty-four b. 1024 c. 10000000000 (base 2) d. A thousand? If you are writing a check, a and b, redundantly. In your check register, b, because that's the way you are accustomed to looking at it and to doing arithmetic; secondarily, because it is a little quicker to write and takes up less space, but you don't think of it as "compressed," do you? Inside your computer, a, b or c, you don't care, as long as it is output correctly; but in fact you get c. For certain purposes, d: rounded off, which corresponds to lossy compression. Your analogy is not really a very useful one here, but I can't help noting that certain drugs are supplied with the water removed and have to be reconstituted for use because they are more stable that way. That is, you get something _more_ like the original by going through this "compression/decompression" cycle than by just letting the solution sit on the shelf. You could make this apply to audio formats if you wanted to: if you saved some redundant information (like a checksum) in the transformed file, it could reproduce the original _more_ faithfully than a bit-for-bit copy that might have or acquire errors in it. -- tom permutt ------------------------------------------------------------------------ tom permutt's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1893 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=21700 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
