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 handle the additional data coming in through the network connection. The tradeoff may favor FLAC. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ JJZolx's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=100783 _______________________________________________ audiophiles mailing list [email protected] http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/audiophiles
