Flac is decoded into uncompressed BUFFERED bits in memory before it is streamed to a DAC. The bits from a wav source and a flac source are an identical PCM 16-bit 44.1khz before they get converted from digital to analog in the DAC. Anyone that says there is a difference in sound stage or anything else is purely false.
Yet, if you separate the decompression stage from the streamer (part), there is an improvement in sound. Roon RAAT or Audirvana, as well as UPnP media servers that decompress FLAC into WAV before you send this out to the streamer do this and they sound different. That’s easily verifiable. So, in theory you are right, in practice, most streamer or streamer/DAC manufacturers don’t isolate their internals well enough.
I rip to Wav for one reason, TIME. Ripping to FLAC is a two step process. It's actually ripping to a temporary WAV file and then converting that file to FLAC. When I am ripping a lot of CDs in one setting, which I do more often than not, I like to hear the results first. I then convert to FLAC at at the moment or I wait until I have more time. It also gives me more flexibility when I edit the ID3 tag or whatever its called on the FLAC,
I don't know what kind of computer you use but I use a 5 year old middle class CPU and converting to flac takes less than a second per song so that isn't really a factor I believe.
When you are making a lossless file copy for a friend / other system etc from WAV to WAV you lose your tags, while with FLAC they just transfer and stay inside the file.
I think "storage is cheap" is a bad argument for uncompressed. FLAC is as close to "free additional space" as we can get without compromising quality. Sure, FLAC may use more power to decompress, but same can be said for uncompressed in respect to the time it takes to load into memory.
@@user-rw1dl5ju9b no, I'm not superior, I just Say FLAC is for afraid and shy users (or fool users) that think about storage and space in the device. I'm just an amateur audioPhilEspector 😆 as Flashbeagle, I'm not superior seeker. If You get offended 'cause You are a FLAC lover, maybe You don't have enough space in your media-device.
I used to rip wav exclusively. But then I learned that some bands would hide easter egg tracks in the pregap space on their cds. Most ripping software that supports flac will preserve this pregap and the cue sheet will be properly adjusted for the pregap. When you rip to wav, the pregap data is ignored. Anyways to access a pregap easter egg song or track on a cd player, you have to be playing the current track and then hold rewind and it'll rewind past 0:00 into the negative where the pregap song is stored.
Thanks Doug and, yes, "this content helped". What I got from was a good dose of "relax, everything is going to OK". And, turns out - for me, it is. Take care. (I'll just play a bit more CSNY...).
I am in the process of re-ripping a lot of my CDs. I did a few in WAV and found that it took about 3 or 4 times longer per CD. That was enough to make me go to FLAC.
You're not the first to mention this. I confess that when I rip, I don't pay much attention to timing -- I throw a disc in and walk away. But I'm going to check that out.
Been ripping with eac to wav for 15 plus years. Glad I made that choice. Storage is much cheaper than 15 yrs ago. With compression you need to uncompress it and just another step for a player to process. I my experience using flacs I find the music is exactly the same except during listening there seems to be more artifacts or delays in some flacs files.
WAV Files are identical to FLAC the only difference is FLAC uncompreses to WAV on the fly during playback apart from that the zeros and ones are no different, it would be mad to use WAV unless your PC is so old that it isn't powerful enough to playback FLAC but your PC would have to be from the 90s for that to be a concern.
It is the audio player that is doing the FLAC decompression, and it may "cheat". Essentially playing back what amounts to some level of lossy. P.S. I use FLAC
I actually use FLAC for my movies. Blu-ray and newer come most of the time with lossless audio. 7.1 and 24 bits and a long movie can drive a WAV file over the 4 GB limit. And compressing multichannel tracks saves a huge amount of space. The savings are WAY more than you encounter with stereo music. a 16 bit 5.1 track willd typically be between 900 and 1,300 kbps. Raw bit rate is 4,608 kbps. 24 bits jumps up to low 3,000 kbps where raw bit rate would be 6,912 kbps. For 7.1 stuff you're looking at typically under 4,500 kbps down from 9,216 kbps raw. I do not keep the DTS and Dolby because they include a lossy core and the entire bit rate is usually way more than what I can get with FLAC. I don't care about the Atmos or :X height metadata.
That's not something I really considered, but I'm not that concerned about "bit rot," because what that is, really, is failure of the storage medium -- and when it comes to digital storage, I'm a huge believer in backing up and backing up and backing up anything you have as many times as you can.
@@PerfectlyNormalBeast that works out to about 5% on a single thread, which is a bit more than what I've seen on my system (although it's the much newer 7700x) I would like to see this comparison on a standalone music player tho in relation to battery life. With a PC, phone, or smartwatch there's too many uncontrollable variables.
do you mean Title and Arstist name? I know WAV can be add titles or info only when the CD is recorded with that information added and the final result is a CD-text ( I do that, with my CDs for my favourite music)
Good video, but ripping a WAV file to a computer file IS NOT a different file format. As BING clarifies: When a WAV audio file is copied to a computer, the audio file is not converted to a different file format. WAV files are uncompressed audio files that are stored in the PCM format. The WAV file format is a wrapper for various audio coding formats, and it is most commonly used for storing uncompressed audio in the linear pulse-code modulation (LPCM) format 2.
You might want to take much of what Bing tells you with a grain of salt. The file encoding scheme on a Compact Disc dates back to the early 1980s, when the CD was released by both Philips and Sony. There was something called the Red Book standard that detailed everything from how the file structure had to look to the physical construction of the disc. Back then, computer storage of music files didn't really exist. In 1991, IBM and Microsoft released the WAV format for storage of uncompressed music files on a computer storage device. It's format is much different than what's on a CD. Therefore, when you rip a CD to your computer in WAV -- or whatever format -- you are, indeed, ripping to a different file format than it was originally.
@@nicksterjOf course there's a difference in the way they all encode data. But the bitstream that's derived and pumped through the DAC remains the same.
FYI, you don’t have to say on the Internet anymore ha ha. Everything is the Internet now. That’s not the old days anymore, where you had to dial in and most of life was off-line Just had to give you some flack ha ha
The difference in sound between the compressed and uncompressed files may be due to the processing power required in the audio device to uncompress compressed files. And the noise it generates. See ruclips.net/video/tbo9mfeK8yg/видео.htmlsi=S_beolKlg5lB4SbP
If you notice, he offers no proof of that in his video, and neither has anyone else making that claim. Also, one has to thing about this: The slowest part of any computer system is the storage I/O, not the processing. FLAC files are half to two-thirds the size, usually, so they're quicker to read off a storage device. Why wouldn't that help?
@@dougschneider8243 It's just his guess, because if there is any difference in sound, it isn't from the source digital information per se, but from its processing by some decoding device. And even if there is any difference, I guess it's very minimal. I rip and store my music in ALAC format.
@@GBukalders You're right -- it's just a guess. But it's also unfortunate because people are looking for advice and guessing isn't the best way to go about things. I would say the difference isn't minimal -- it's nonexistent.
"clever compression" is basically playing a trick on our ears. I think the listening experience of WAV is going to be superior. You cannot shave hundreds of kilobits per second and not have any effect on the sound. Personally, I rip using accurate rip and rip to AIFF which is the best option, it is identically uncompressed to WAV and contains metadata like artist, album and song name plus artwork. WAV does not include artwork. Just rip to AIFF using accurate rip and rip at about 10x speed and you will have peace of mind.
It's also... sort of as ubiquitously compatible as WAV? But hey, if you've got Foobar2000 or fre:ac then you can convert from one to the other without losing anything anyway.
It doesn't shave anything it compresses the file whilst it's inactive but unpacks it during playback it's very clever and completely identical sound quality to WAV.
![If you can't hear this then you're not an audiophile [See description for link to followup video]](/img/1.gif)
Flac is decoded into uncompressed BUFFERED bits in memory before it is streamed to a DAC. The bits from a wav source and a flac source are an identical PCM 16-bit 44.1khz before they get converted from digital to analog in the DAC. Anyone that says there is a difference in sound stage or anything else is purely false.
Except of course the file size difference if that was a consideration.
Yet, if you separate the decompression stage from the streamer (part), there is an improvement in sound. Roon RAAT or Audirvana, as well as UPnP media servers that decompress FLAC into WAV before you send this out to the streamer do this and they sound different. That’s easily verifiable. So, in theory you are right, in practice, most streamer or streamer/DAC manufacturers don’t isolate their internals well enough.
Wav is good for editing audio but that is the only reason I would use it now as big files.
I take it you store in FLAC?
@@dougschneider8243nah mate, he uses 16 kbps mp3
I rip to Wav for one reason, TIME. Ripping to FLAC is a two step process. It's actually ripping to a temporary WAV file and then converting that file to FLAC. When I am ripping a lot of CDs in one setting, which I do more often than not, I like to hear the results first. I then convert to FLAC at at the moment or I wait until I have more time. It also gives me more flexibility when I edit the ID3 tag or whatever its called on the FLAC,
Does that mean you rip CD's to image files with cue sheets? Because that's about the fastest way (while using EAC).
@@user-rw1dl5ju9b no just the old-fashioned way
I don't know what kind of computer you use but I use a 5 year old middle class CPU and converting to flac takes less than a second per song so that isn't really a factor I believe.
When you are making a lossless file copy for a friend / other system etc from WAV to WAV you lose your tags, while with FLAC they just transfer and stay inside the file.
I think "storage is cheap" is a bad argument for uncompressed. FLAC is as close to "free additional space" as we can get without compromising quality. Sure, FLAC may use more power to decompress, but same can be said for uncompressed in respect to the time it takes to load into memory.
FLAC is for the afraid people about storage.
@@antonio.x22 Knock it off, you aren't "superior" to anyone.
@@user-rw1dl5ju9b no, I'm not superior,
I just Say FLAC is for afraid and shy users (or fool users) that think about storage and space in the device.
I'm just an amateur audioPhilEspector 😆 as Flashbeagle, I'm not superior seeker. If You get offended 'cause You are a FLAC lover, maybe You don't have enough space in your media-device.
@@antonio.x22 Do you tell MP3 & AAC users the same thing?
I just Say FLAC is for afraid and shy users (or fool users) that worry about storage and space in the device. @@user-rw1dl5ju9b
Very clear explanation thanks for expressing it in such a manner that is easily received by youth.
I used to rip wav exclusively. But then I learned that some bands would hide easter egg tracks in the pregap space on their cds. Most ripping software that supports flac will preserve this pregap and the cue sheet will be properly adjusted for the pregap. When you rip to wav, the pregap data is ignored. Anyways to access a pregap easter egg song or track on a cd player, you have to be playing the current track and then hold rewind and it'll rewind past 0:00 into the negative where the pregap song is stored.
Fascinating. Can you tell us a specific example?
Did you try ripping as CD image with EAC or XLD where the log will show you where the table of contents begins?
I started ripping all my CDs to .wav but with FLAC you can store metadata easier.
I think its that some people believe the uncompressing the flac file can change the sound. Personally very much doubt that and dont worry much.
Thanks Doug and, yes, "this content helped". What I got from was a good dose of "relax, everything is going to OK". And, turns out - for me, it is. Take care. (I'll just play a bit more CSNY...).
Glad it helped. There's a lot of bad info on this topic.
I am in the process of re-ripping a lot of my CDs. I did a few in WAV and found that it took about 3 or 4 times longer per CD. That was enough to make me go to FLAC.
You're not the first to mention this. I confess that when I rip, I don't pay much attention to timing -- I throw a disc in and walk away. But I'm going to check that out.
@@dougschneider8243 It might depend upon the ripping s/w.
Been ripping with eac to wav for 15 plus years. Glad I made that choice. Storage is much cheaper than 15 yrs ago. With compression you need to uncompress it and just another step for a player to process. I my experience using flacs I find the music is exactly the same except during listening there seems to be more artifacts or delays in some flacs files.
How did you manage 15 years ago? Everything was really low back then.
WAV Files are identical to FLAC the only difference is FLAC uncompreses to WAV on the fly during playback apart from that the zeros and ones are no different, it would be mad to use WAV unless your PC is so old that it isn't powerful enough to playback FLAC but your PC would have to be from the 90s for that to be a concern.
It is the audio player that is doing the FLAC decompression, and it may "cheat". Essentially playing back what amounts to some level of lossy.
P.S. I use FLAC
I actually use FLAC for my movies. Blu-ray and newer come most of the time with lossless audio. 7.1 and 24 bits and a long movie can drive a WAV file over the 4 GB limit. And compressing multichannel tracks saves a huge amount of space. The savings are WAY more than you encounter with stereo music. a 16 bit 5.1 track willd typically be between 900 and 1,300 kbps. Raw bit rate is 4,608 kbps. 24 bits jumps up to low 3,000 kbps where raw bit rate would be 6,912 kbps. For 7.1 stuff you're looking at typically under 4,500 kbps down from 9,216 kbps raw. I do not keep the DTS and Dolby because they include a lossy core and the entire bit rate is usually way more than what I can get with FLAC. I don't care about the Atmos or :X height metadata.
WAV doesn't support metadata, which should rule it out IMO. I'd use AIFF for uncompressed audio, but I just use ALAC and 256 kbps AAC for my phone.
Large uncompressed files are more susceptible to bit rot.
That's not something I really considered, but I'm not that concerned about "bit rot," because what that is, really, is failure of the storage medium -- and when it comes to digital storage, I'm a huge believer in backing up and backing up and backing up anything you have as many times as you can.
In most systems WAV vs FLAC sound the same. In higher / ultra - high end systems with very high resolution capabilities a difference can be heard.
Now do a phase inversion test between the two (from the same source) & tell me what you get.
Agreed
What high end system very high resolution capabilities you know?
@MF Nickster thanks for the knowledge
@mfnickster9754 How so ? You can’t add information that’s not there.
I've been searching for processor usage of playback flac vs wav. That's my final concern. I'll probably have to test it myself
Let us know what you learn!
I haven't made any wav files, but the flac playback is bouncing between 0 and 0.2% processor usage :)
@@PerfectlyNormalBeast On what sort of CPU?
@@ZeldagigafanMatthew Ryzen 9 3900 12-Core, 16 ram
@@PerfectlyNormalBeast that works out to about 5% on a single thread, which is a bit more than what I've seen on my system (although it's the much newer 7700x) I would like to see this comparison on a standalone music player tho in relation to battery life. With a PC, phone, or smartwatch there's too many uncontrollable variables.
I love PBS's SoundStage. : - )
What about broad support for embedded metadata?
do you mean Title and Arstist name?
I know WAV can be add titles or info only when the CD is recorded with that information added and the final result is a CD-text ( I do that, with my CDs for my favourite music)
Why WAV over AIFF? WAV does not support embedded metadata.
Storage isn’t really a problem as it was back then so WAV all the way!
True!
I remember when I converted my first cd at home on you compacq pc to wave on my 10 giga hard drive and re convert it to mp3 😅
Good video, but ripping a WAV file to a computer file IS NOT a different file format. As BING clarifies: When a WAV audio file is copied to a computer, the audio file is not converted to a different file format. WAV files are uncompressed audio files that are stored in the PCM format. The WAV file format is a wrapper for various audio coding formats, and it is most commonly used for storing uncompressed audio in the linear pulse-code modulation (LPCM) format 2.
You might want to take much of what Bing tells you with a grain of salt. The file encoding scheme on a Compact Disc dates back to the early 1980s, when the CD was released by both Philips and Sony. There was something called the Red Book standard that detailed everything from how the file structure had to look to the physical construction of the disc. Back then, computer storage of music files didn't really exist. In 1991, IBM and Microsoft released the WAV format for storage of uncompressed music files on a computer storage device. It's format is much different than what's on a CD. Therefore, when you rip a CD to your computer in WAV -- or whatever format -- you are, indeed, ripping to a different file format than it was originally.
I stand corrected. Good point about BING too!
@@nicksterjOf course there's a difference in the way they all encode data. But the bitstream that's derived and pumped through the DAC remains the same.
FYI, you don’t have to say on the Internet anymore ha ha. Everything is the Internet now.
That’s not the old days anymore, where you had to dial in and most of life was off-line
Just had to give you some flack ha ha
So if you just feel like it one day because your bored even though tagging will be impossible. Kiss cover art goodbye. 😁
The difference in sound between the compressed and uncompressed files may be due to the processing power required in the audio device to uncompress compressed files. And the noise it generates.
See ruclips.net/video/tbo9mfeK8yg/видео.htmlsi=S_beolKlg5lB4SbP
If you notice, he offers no proof of that in his video, and neither has anyone else making that claim. Also, one has to thing about this: The slowest part of any computer system is the storage I/O, not the processing. FLAC files are half to two-thirds the size, usually, so they're quicker to read off a storage device. Why wouldn't that help?
@@dougschneider8243 It's just his guess, because if there is any difference in sound, it isn't from the source digital information per se, but from its processing by some decoding device. And even if there is any difference, I guess it's very minimal. I rip and store my music in ALAC format.
@@GBukalders You're right -- it's just a guess. But it's also unfortunate because people are looking for advice and guessing isn't the best way to go about things. I would say the difference isn't minimal -- it's nonexistent.
How to rip audio from a DTS audio cd
"clever compression" is basically playing a trick on our ears. I think the listening experience of WAV is going to be superior. You cannot shave hundreds of kilobits per second and not have any effect on the sound.
Personally, I rip using accurate rip and rip to AIFF which is the best option, it is identically uncompressed to WAV and contains metadata like artist, album and song name plus artwork. WAV does not include artwork. Just rip to AIFF using accurate rip and rip at about 10x speed and you will have peace of mind.
It's also... sort of as ubiquitously compatible as WAV?
But hey, if you've got Foobar2000 or fre:ac then you can convert from one to the other without losing anything anyway.
Untrue about .WAV and no metadata/artwork -
I just Ripped a music CD: Silverchair - Frogstomp and Tagged it with all it's Metadata and Album Art
@@ProflexFitness With what program, because it doesn’t work on all of them.
@@user-rw1dl5ju9b Mp3tag - the universal Tag editor
It doesn't shave anything it compresses the file whilst it's inactive but unpacks it during playback it's very clever and completely identical sound quality to WAV.
Wav is INFERIOR to ISO😂
If is compressed is missing data period.
Nope
@@soundstagenetwork you can argue all you want but is a fact not an opinion
@@Morpheus170What you stated is not a fact. Ever heard of ZIP files? Lossless compression coming on 35 years.
@@dougschneider8243Yes, what about zip files?
Yes, what about zip files? nothing to do with the topic at hand.@@dougschneider8243
Just buy a cd player. And that’s it. 🤷🏽♂️