JJZolx wrote: > This isn't new. It goes back years. There have been many people who > claim to hear a difference in sound quality between playing WAV and FLAC > files. Has nothing to do with the concept of lossy compression. > > There are a number of theories as to why there may be a difference. > Could be noise caused by the CPU processing required to decode FLAC, or > it could have to do with the file structure of FLAC, which requires a > lot of memory manipulation to deal with frames and blocks and > reconstructing the stream into a simple stream of stereo PCM samples. > > It's also been postulated that with a networked streaming player there > is very little difference, or even that FLAC can sound better. Streaming > WAV requires no CPU processing to decode the data, but it requires more > processing to deal with increased network traffic for the larger amount > of data that must be received. The tradeoff may favor FLAC.
This an old complaint and made some sense back when CPUs were much slower and much less powerful. Today's computers and computers made within the last 5 years are all quite capable of handling flac to wav on-the-fly decompression without any loss in sound quality. Besides if the high end is worried about this why doesn't one of the manufacturers come up with a network player that decompresses the flac file to wav, sends the wav file to a buffer and then the buffer feeds the sonically pure wav file to the DAC. Living Rm: Transporter-SimAudio pre/power amps-Vandersteen 3A Sign. & sub Home Theater: Touch-Marantz HTR-Energy Veritas 2.1 & Linn sub Computer Rm: Touch-Headroom Desktop w/DAC-Aragon amp-Energy Veritas 2.1 & Energy sub Bedroom: Touch-HR Desktop w/DAC-Audio Refinement amp-Energy Veritas 2.0 Guest Rm: Duet-Sony soundbar Garage: SB3-JVC compact system Controls: iPeng; SB Controller; Moose & Muso Server: SBS on dedicated windows 7 computer w/2 Drobos 'Last.fm' (http://www.last.fm/user/jazzfann/) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ralphpnj's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10827 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=100783 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list audiophiles@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
