Sound quality comparison

[DavidHB]

(25-08-2014 09:08)best Wrote:  These days when I get a new disc I am in two minds : flac or wav? I then go with wav, my logic being it should sound better, as there is less 'manipulation' of the original that way. Of course the advantage of flac being a smaller size.

My decision was to rip music files to, and store them as, FLAC, and to transcode to WAV24 on playback. This has worked well for me. Here's the logic underlying my decision.

All formats represent some form of encoding, and all lossless formats are capable of being converted back to the 'original' digital encoding of the analogue sound pattern. It is therefore probably not appropriate to argue that any particular form of lossless encoding (whether compressed or not) is 'purer' or 'more original' than another. Where the WAV format seems to win out (based on listening experiences quite widely reported in this forum and elsewhere) is that the player has to do less work than with the compressed format to convert the digital stream back to an analogue signal. But, from the player's perspective, the stream from a .wav file and the corresponding wave transcoding of (say) a compressed FLAC file are the same thing, if the server and transcoder are doing their respective jobs properly. We should not therefore be surprised that there is, reportedly, no difference in SQ between the 'original' .wav file and its transcoded counterpart.

Hard disk space these days is much cheaper than it once was, but replacing and upgrading data storage is a hassle, and therefore to be done as little as possible. My current NAS has a RAID array with a capacity of just under 2TB, of which my music files (some 700+ CDs) take up about 10%. The NAS is used for a range of storage purposes, so I don't want the music collection to grow completely out of hand. Storing the files as compressed FLAC, rather than .wav or certainly WAV24, saves me a useful amount of space.

It is also useful from my perspective that FLAC uses one of the more straightforward (and consistent) tagging schemes. The situation with tagging wave files seems to have improved of late, but remains more complex; complexity makes incompatibility more likely.

All in all, the case for storing files in lossless compressed formats (in particular, FLAC) is respectable rather than overwhelming. At the same time, the case for sticking with .wav as a storage format does not seem particularly strong when (as with MinimServer/MinimStreamer) good transcoding systems are available. But either option can be made to work.

David