Archiving : FLAC sounds worse than WAV ! (EAC&Foobar) Why? Wrong Player ? Archive in BWF ?

[sonorsnoopy]

I am about to rip my cd collection. I tested EAC & Foobar with WAV & FLAC files and found that FLAC sounds like 5 percent less dynamic than WAV.

(Some people seem to agree in blind testing). I converted the FLAC file back to WAV and found that that file didnt sound as good as the original one.

Something must be wrong with encoding, replay or conversion.

 

Do i need a better flac player to get the original wav sound - is that possible with flac in general? And if not - how to archive BWF (Broadcast Wave) files & which player ? (foobar doesnt play BWF, JRMC sounds worse than foobar with wav=bwf)

 

What to do ?

 

[dsnyder]

Hello,

 

Lots of folks seem to be experiencing this so there must be some common problem out there that's causing FLAC and WAV to sound different. I can understand how they might sound different on some systems when FLAC is decompressed on-the-fly during playback (changes in jitter and noise signature when the CPU is working a bit harder), but I dont' understand what's happening in situations like yours where a difference is heard between the original WAV and one that was created from decompressing the FLAC file.

 

I guess it might be helpful to know precisely what steps you are following to convert your WAV files to and from FLAC. Perhaps something is going wrong? In all of my tests (and I've done a lot as other folks on this forum can testify), there is no PCM data lost in conversions between FLAC and WAV as long as this conversion is done correctly. The dbPoweramp tools do a nice job of this but there are many others that work just as well.

 

I'm not familiar with the BWF format, but any lossless format that has good support for metadata and is well supported by your media player of choise should be fine. You may wish to consider a player that decompresses the tracks up-front and plays them from RAM if your computer does not perform well with on-the-fly decompression. Hope this helps.

 

-- David

 

 

[Encore]

I also find Wav to sound slightly better than Flac, with more air and better sound stage. However, the difference is not huge, and I'm not able to detect any difference after converting back to Wav.

 

Do the Wav-files converted from Flac sound better than the Flac-files themselves? If so, then the difference should be less than 5%. It would seem that this is a difference so small that it would be very difficult to consistently detect the difference ...

 

[khollister]

I'm in the Apple universe (you do know the girls are prettier over here? :-)) and have tried the ALAC (Apple's lossless compression) vs AIFF comparison a few times. I am convinced there is absolutely no alteration of the files as I have gone round trip with no sonic difference. I also have not convinced myself that AIFF playback is better than ALAC - thought I heard really subtle differences a couple times, but have not been able to repeat it since.

 

[Audio_ELF]

Thanks ;-)

 

Eloise

 

[wgscott]

I am using this now for the ultimate isolation: