Wave or Flac

Posted by: meni48 on 20 April 2014

I have a question for you guys what is best way to rip cd`s wave or flac,and after ripping how to listen through my nds with flac files or wave my ripping software is dbpoweramp cd ripper thanks for your help

Posted on: 27 April 2014 by Jasonf
Originally Posted by PepsiCan:
Originally Posted by PinkHamster:
Originally Posted by PepsiCan:
Originally Posted by Foxman50:

while i would say the difference is subtle, once you know what the effect sounds like it seems quite easy to pin point it. Can of worms spring to mind. Are our ears fooling us.

 

Graeme

 

Agreed. And the can of worms is overflowing Maybe it isn't the ears, but our brains?

 

Just for the record, I am not in any way saying you're (not) hearing things. I'm as intrigued as you are and I'm just trying to find an explanation. And I would be interested to see what would happen in a blind test.

 

But to summarise:

  1. You compared uFLAC with WAV.
  2. I content there should be no (audible) difference because both containers are PCM.
  3. Simon says there is still a difference in how uFLAC and WAV are decoded.

 

Fare summary?

 

p.s.: one would think this is a hot topic at the Naim R&D department (and Linn and others....)? If only they would give us a bone here?

I would think that they have better things to do ...

 

Perhaps. But at the same time companies like Naim, Linn and Focal have a vested interest in getting this debate sorted, both from the hardware perspective as well as the software perspective.

I was under the impression that Naim had undertaken an R&D programme on this topic and had concluded that WAV heralded the best results, hence the so-called server/streamer optimisation.???

 

Jason.

Posted on: 27 April 2014 by PinkHamster

I would love to see the working papers of such 'R&D' activities. They can at best be unbiased emperical listening test. I doubt that such documents exist at Naim's.

Posted on: 27 April 2014 by Simon-in-Suffolk

Aleg, interesting find thanks. Yes it would be interesting to establish whether indeed the Rice encoding escape parameter is being used to convey a string of stereo sample words. I would expect in this scenario, if indeed, it is the case, for the uncompressed FLAC file to be larger than the equivalent WAV because of the FLAC framing and sub framing overheads ...would you agree?

Simon

Posted on: 27 April 2014 by PepsiCan
Originally Posted by Jasonf:
I was under the impression that Naim had undertaken an R&D programme on this topic and had concluded that WAV heralded the best results, hence the so-called server/streamer optimisation.???

 

Jason.

Yeah, but why? What is the technical reasoning and explanation behind that?

Posted on: 27 April 2014 by PepsiCan
Originally Posted by Simon-in-Suffolk:

Aleg, interesting find thanks. Yes it would be interesting to establish whether indeed the Rice encoding escape parameter is being used to convey a string of stereo sample words. I would expect in this scenario, if indeed, it is the case, for the uncompressed FLAC file to be larger than the equivalent WAV because of the FLAC framing and sub framing overheads ...would you agree?

Simon

I did that test last night and yes, the uncompressed FLAC is always larger than the corresponding WAV. The difference is usually a couple of dozens / hundreds of kilobytes, so it is not by much I would say. But what causes the size differences exactly I don't know. "Metadata", that elusive phrase again.

 

I ripped Eagles "Get over it".

 

WAV = 37305642 (37306368 on disk)

FLAC = 37329090 (37330944 on disk)

Posted on: 27 April 2014 by likesmusic
Originally Posted by PinkHamster:

I would love to see the working papers of such 'R&D' activities. They can at best be unbiased emperical listening test. I doubt that such documents exist at Naim's.

It's such a strange admission for an R&D team. "Our designs can't play FLAC very well".  Perhaps some more R&D is needed. Or at least D. 

 

Mind you there was all that voodoo about naim rips being superior. "Our designs can't play other peoples bit identical rips very well". What happened to that?

Posted on: 27 April 2014 by PepsiCan
Originally Posted by Simon-in-Suffolk:
There are some third party extensions that are registered, but they look to be metadata and application chunk related data. Is it one of these that is structured a sample word string? If so can you point me to the specification, I would like to learn more, and perhaps so would other amateur software developers.

Simon

 

 

 http://xiph.org/flac/format.html

 

Found it in plain English. It is in the FAQ section of the Xiph org foundation. LPCM is the same format you usually find inside a WAV (during my search I also found that WAV containers can also contain other formats, amongst them MP3...).

 

The question I don't have a definite answer to yet is whether uncompressed FLAC actually uses this format in its container, or something else. Also, it seems that even when LPCM is used in FLAC, the way the container stores the format inside differs between FLAC and WAV (and possible AIFF) as well.

 

What kind of audio samples does FLAC support?

FLAC supports linear PCM samples with a resolution between 4 and 32 bits per sample. FLAC does not support floating point samples. In some cases it is possible to losslessly transform samples from an incompatible range to a FLAC-compatible range before encoding.

FLAC supports linear sample rates from 1Hz - 655350Hz in 1Hz increments.

Will FLAC ever support floating-point samples?

It's unlikely FLAC will ever support floating-point samples natively. The main application for floating-point is audio engineering, which demands easy editing and very high speed for both encoding and decoding above everything else.

FLAC is designed as a consumer audio format. It trades ease of editing for a featureful, robust transport layer more suited for playback, and encoding speed for more compression and faster decompression.