Netgear Readynas Ultra 2 plus

[DavidHB]

(25-10-2017 16:31)ClausDK Wrote:  Somehow I like the idea of having the rips in original format, not converted. Thinking that converting to lower res and back always will be less optimal (which might be wrong, but that's my logic).

No discourtesy intended, but I'm afraid that is wrong.

FLAC uses lossless compression. When the stream is decompressed for playing, the digital data that is played is identical to the original. Manufacturers have tested this on many occasions. If there is any difference between the sound from a WAV file and the sound from the corresponding FLAC file (and, as I said, this is a controversial issue), it results from the different way(s) in which the renderer handles the different formats, and not from the formats themselves.

While this might seem to be a distinction without a difference, it isn't. As the performance of renderers improves over time, the difference in sound quality may change or disappear entirely. So any difference is context dependent. Moreover, if you transcode FLAC to WAV, the renderer will know no different; from its perspective, the stream is WAV data, indeed the original WAV data that was encoded in the FLAC file. At no point in the chain of events does the resolution of the music data change. Even when the 16 bit FLAC file is transcoded to WAV24, the extra bit depth is padded out with zeroes, so the digital music data remains the same.

I hope that this explains why you are not losing anything substantive by storing your music files in FLAC rather than WAV format.

David