Compressed FLAC

It's not a "compromise," as while it's compressed it's not "lossy."  I believe it accurate to say that more math is needed to unpack a more-compressed vs. less-compressed flac file, but that in the end the resulting data output is exactly the same; no info has been lost in one vs. the other.  Such is not the case for example between 128kbps mp3 and 256kbps mp3; more info is truly lost in the former vs. the later.

Yes as Bart mentions there is no loss of data with FLAC (or ALAC). It is all about information entropy theory. The compression efficiency number on encode effectively means how hard the encoder searches for common patterns to substitute for a symbol that contains less data than the data pattern being substituted ... this requires more processing power in the encoder to search more data.

The decode effort is the same no matter what compression level the file was encoded with... so the maths is the same on decode irrespective of the compression efficiency  level.

Therefore with FLAC it makes no sense not to compress at the max level.. assuming you can accept a slightly slower rip speed. Most rippers are quite powerful these days and so the increased time it is going to take to compress will be neglible.

Bart posted:

It's not a "compromise," as while it's compressed it's not "lossy."  I believe it accurate to say that more math is needed to unpack a more-compressed vs. less-compressed flac file, but that in the end the resulting data output is exactly the same; no info has been lost in one vs. the other.  Such is not the case for example between 128kbps mp3 and 256kbps mp3; more info is truly lost in the former vs. the later.

 Phew, Thanks Bart I’ll leave those files alone ????

Simon-in-Suffolk posted:

Yes as Bart mentions there is no loss of data with FLAC (or ALAC). It is all about information entropy theory. The compression efficiency number on encode effectively means how hard the encoder searches for common patterns to substitute for a symbol that contains less data than the data pattern being substituted ... this requires more processing power in the encoder to search more data.

The decode effort is the same no matter what compression level the file was encoded with... so the maths is the same on decode irrespective of the compression efficiency  level.

Therefore with FLAC it makes no sense not to compress at the max level.. assuming you can accept a slightly slower rip speed. Most rippers are quite powerful these days and so the increased time it is going to take to compress will be neglible.

The beauty of all these formats is that it's pretty easy to transcode between lossless formats with free/cheap tools.

The older streamers I believe from older comments were subjectively a little better with WAV, the feeling being that the streamers generated less processing noise/overhead handling these.

Not sure if there's any near consensus with the new streamers as yet.

I wonder if anyone has compared uncompressed vs compressed FLAC in the past for subtle differences?  As you say most rippers/computers are not going to struggle encoding or decoding any of these formats and will undoubtedly do so many times faster than real time so perhaps no real issue.  As drive space is relatively cheap these days I embarked on ripping to uncompressed FLAC, but suspect it may be overkill and a waste of space.

One advantage of compressed lossless formats I guess is if they are decoded by the streamer then the stream requires less network bandwidth which might be quite helpful if there are LAN bottlenecks/weak points.

Whilst, in principle, Bart and Simon are correct about FLAC, it's not quite the whole story. Alley Cat touched on transcription, which could be key to your question.

To my ears, YMMV, it is very easy to discern the difference between compressed and uncompressed FLAC, the latter being much much better to listen to.

However, if you transcode either to WAV or other format it will sound optimal, and this is probably what you should do.

O think the theory goes like this... unpacking FLAC on-the-fly increases CPU cycles in the streamer and is detrimental to SQ, whereas uncompressed FLAC is played as-is. Transcribing to FLAC, on the other hand, puts the CPU load on the server/NAS which sends uncompressed WAV to the streamer and is played as-is.

You might think that uncompressed FLAC and WAV might sound the same from this description, but there is also a SQ difference between the formats; most people seem to favour WAV (Paul Stephenson certainly declared a preference).

Give it a go, you might be surprised, and you don't even have to re-rip or unpack your library. 

All in my opinion of course.

HTH

 PS. I don't want to go head-to-head with Simon - he scares me   

About a decade ago when I started out ripping and storing all of music on a harddisk, for the sheer convenience of being able to play whatever I wanted from a few keyboard stroke and mouse click and the ability to create a playlist instead of swapping disc every few tracks etc. I was a firm believer of ALAC and bytes are bytes.

After I purchased a Naimuniti one I set off a mini experiment on myself, so I tried a few tracks in ALAC, AIFF and the Synology NAS transcoding to Wav. To my ear in my home, with the incredibly small sample size of tracks I played,  I found AIFF and Transcoding sound ever so slighty better than ALAC. I didn't find difference between AIFF and Transcoding (probably because My NAS was sufficient far away from the Naim in another room?)

I finally decided to transform all files to AIFF because you never know what a software upgrade would do to transcoding in the future, e.g. a software engineer may down/up sample the wav to 48khz/96khz for some logical reason or by a bug, knowing that a NAS software engineer's primary goal is to keep the media server and the NAS running, while Naim engineers are the only one who might share your goal to make Naim gear sound the best. Nowadays the storage costs for music isn't too great, a RAW photo file maybe 30MB, the same as a AIFF track? The storage costs is just a fraction of a SNAIC cable?

All in all just be brave and test out which way you prefer. I don't care if there is no logical explanation for it, even if it is just for accoustic-psychological reasons. Your enjoyment will not be taken away without logical or scientific reasoning, just like Placebos is scientifically proven to help patient recovery.

Enjoy!

PS I really do love to have logical and scientific reasons for whatever I do, sometimes I also check against my ears and enjoyment in the case of Audio.

intothevoid posted:

Whilst, in principle, Bart and Simon are correct about FLAC, it's not quite the whole story. Alley Cat touched on transcription, which could be key to your question.

To my ears, YMMV, it is very easy to discern the difference between compressed and uncompressed FLAC, the latter being much much better to listen to.

However, if you transcode either to WAV or other format it will sound optimal, and this is probably what you should do.

O think the theory goes like this... unpacking FLAC on-the-fly increases CPU cycles in the streamer and is detrimental to SQ, whereas uncompressed FLAC is played as-is. Transcribing to FLAC, on the other hand, puts the CPU load on the server/NAS which sends uncompressed WAV to the streamer and is played as-is.

You might think that uncompressed FLAC and WAV might sound the same from this description, but there is also a SQ difference between the formats; most people seem to favour WAV (Paul Stephenson certainly declared a preference).

Give it a go, you might be surprised, and you don't even have to re-rip or unpack your library. 

All in my opinion of course.

HTH

 PS. I don't want to go head-to-head with Simon - he scares me   

Chuckle... FLAC can indeed  be encoded where supported with no compression, although I don’t think it’s part of the formal standard, and this uses effectively PCM encoding within a FLAC file structure. Therefore when FLAC is encoded this way, there is no compression on decoding. If FLAC is compressed, then the effort required to uncompress is the same no matter the level of compression. The varying effort goes into the encoding.

On FLAC or ALAC decode, the streamer conducts more processing to reconstruct the LPCM... on some streamers this processing causes low level levels of cross talk into sample reconstruction clocks and analogue ground planes and voltage lines... this therefore causes an audible signature. I find decoupling the DAC from the streamer almost entirely eliminates this.

Naim have been focussing hard on improving decoupling in their new streamers so it would be interesting to what extent this has been audibly improved upon compared to earlier models. Also it’s not clear whether the new enlarged spooling buffers the new streamers use stores the audio in LPCM or in the encoded format. If the former, there could be more of a SQ shift between spooling and playing out from memory with FLAC... ie part way through a track... 

There.. hopefully not too scary.

lhau posted:

About a decade ago when I started out ripping and storing all of music on a harddisk, for the sheer convenience of being able to play whatever I wanted from a few keyboard stroke and mouse click and the ability to create a playlist instead of swapping disc every few tracks etc. I was a firm believer of ALAC and bytes are bytes.

After I purchased a Naimuniti one I set off a mini experiment on myself, so I tried a few tracks in ALAC, AIFF and the Synology NAS transcoding to Wav. To my ear in my home, with the incredibly small sample size of tracks I played,  I found AIFF and Transcoding sound ever so slighty better than ALAC. I didn't find difference between AIFF and Transcoding (probably because My NAS was sufficient far away from the Naim in another room?)

I finally decided to transform all files to AIFF because you never know what a software upgrade would do to transcoding in the future, e.g. a software engineer may down/up sample the wav to 48khz/96khz for some logical reason or by a bug, knowing that a NAS software engineer's primary goal is to keep the media server and the NAS running, while Naim engineers are the only one who might share your goal to make Naim gear sound the best. Nowadays the storage costs for music isn't too great, a RAW photo file maybe 30MB, the same as a AIFF track? The storage costs is just a fraction of a SNAIC cable?

All in all just be brave and test out which way you prefer. I don't care if there is no logical explanation for it, even if it is just for accoustic-psychological reasons. Your enjoyment will not be taken away without logical or scientific reasoning, just like Placebos is scientifically proven to help patient recovery.

Enjoy!

PS I really do love to have logical and scientific reasons for whatever I do, sometimes I also check against my ears and enjoyment in the case of Audio. 

I moved quite a few years ago to 'store as flac, transcode to wav at the server for playback.'

As for your PS, I have found that I MUST do such a check blinded (make someone else pick the versions and not tell me) otherwise merely knowing that 'A is compressed and B is not' "colors" my opinion.  We're all entitled to our opinions - colored or not - but I like reducing variables that really matter to me.  It liberates me to enjoy the music more and not be listening for artifacts of flac5 vs flac0 that may or may not be there . . . 

Bart posted:

lhau posted:

About a decade ago when I started out ripping and storing all of music on a harddisk, for the sheer convenience of being able to play whatever I wanted from a few keyboard stroke and mouse click and the ability to create a playlist instead of swapping disc every few tracks etc. I was a firm believer of ALAC and bytes are bytes.

After I purchased a Naimuniti one I set off a mini experiment on myself, so I tried a few tracks in ALAC, AIFF and the Synology NAS transcoding to Wav. To my ear in my home, with the incredibly small sample size of tracks I played,  I found AIFF and Transcoding sound ever so slighty better than ALAC. I didn't find difference between AIFF and Transcoding (probably because My NAS was sufficient far away from the Naim in another room?)

I finally decided to transform all files to AIFF because you never know what a software upgrade would do to transcoding in the future, e.g. a software engineer may down/up sample the wav to 48khz/96khz for some logical reason or by a bug, knowing that a NAS software engineer's primary goal is to keep the media server and the NAS running, while Naim engineers are the only one who might share your goal to make Naim gear sound the best. Nowadays the storage costs for music isn't too great, a RAW photo file maybe 30MB, the same as a AIFF track? The storage costs is just a fraction of a SNAIC cable?

All in all just be brave and test out which way you prefer. I don't care if there is no logical explanation for it, even if it is just for accoustic-psychological reasons. Your enjoyment will not be taken away without logical or scientific reasoning, just like Placebos is scientifically proven to help patient recovery.

Enjoy!

PS I really do love to have logical and scientific reasons for whatever I do, sometimes I also check against my ears and enjoyment in the case of Audio. 

I moved quite a few years ago to 'store as flac, transcode to wav at the server for playback.'

As for your PS, I have found that I MUST do such a check blinded (make someone else pick the versions and not tell me) otherwise merely knowing that 'A is compressed and B is not' "colors" my opinion.  We're all entitled to our opinions - colored or not - but I like reducing variables that really matter to me.  It liberates me to enjoy the music more and not be listening for artifacts of flac5 vs flac0 that may or may not be there . . . 

IMHO, I wouldn't necessarily blindfold myself to do it.

The primary purpose would have been to make myself happy with my choice; to prove scientifically to anyone would be considered secondary.....

Indeed we all deserve to be happy, especially after spending this much!