Robin Bowes Wrote: > > In the case of lossless vs. uncompressed (I am thinking flac vs. wav > here), there can not be any difference - flac decodes to the exact > same > bits that were used to create the compressed file. > >
I agree, however I didn't make my point clear, sorry about that. I wasn't trying to talk about whether there is a difference, I was trying to get to the bottom of why we believe such a thing. I think the point here is that a) it makes logical sense and we believe in logic AND b) it is confirmed by our listening experience. For example lets say you tried a new encoding that I claim is lossless (MalcolmsLossLess MLL), and you found that every time you used it you could immediately tell the difference between MLL and WAV. What would you conclude? I expect you would come up with a number of thoughts: 1) the encoding is lossless, but the software has bugs and isn't executing the encoding/decoding properly 2) The encoding is faulty ie it's not lossless and you would be more willing to believe 1 or 2 above than believe that the encoding is lossless and bug free. Essentially you have a stronger belief in lossless encoding sounding identical than you do in me and my software (and that's perfectly reasonable). All of these are essentially beliefs, until you do some testing on my software or algorithm you don't know which of 1 or 2 to believe but you would rather believe them than lossless could sound different. This makes perfect sense based on past experience as: 1) software often has bugs 2) complex algorithms can be misunderstood. I hope I've added to the 'belief' debate, I didn't mean to suggest I believed that lossless could be somehow different (I use FLAC 100% and believe it is perfect - and I've written software to allow me to test it ABX) Malcolm -- mwphoto http://www.last.fm/user/mwphoto/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ mwphoto's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=652 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=21700 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/audiophiles
