Computer Audio Asylum: Testing between WAV and FLAC by John Swenson Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

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Posted by John Swenson (A ) on May 30, 2007 at 15:26:46

In Reply to: Lossless should sound a lot bettern than uncompressed posted by Scrith on May 29, 2007 at 13:00:02:

I've done quite a few comparisons between WAV and FLAC in different system configurations.

And yes I CAN hear a difference under some circumstances and not in others.

In my current setup using a squeezbox I can definately hear a difference between streaming wav or flac (flac sounds worse) but I cannot hear a difference between wav or flac stored on the server. In all cases there are no bit errors, I have played a DTS recording stored originally as a wav file under all these situations and sent the digital out from the SB to a DTS decoder and I get the proper music out of it. If I do anything which I know changes bits (digital domain volume control, resampling etc) all I get is noise outof the decoder. This is a pretty good indication that whatever is causing the sonic differences is not bit changes.

With a USB DAC connected to a computer I can tell the difference between wav and flac under some situations. With short cables or the Optics USB cable I cannot tell the difference, but with long passive cables I can hear a difference. Checking bit accuracy is not so easy in this case. My guess is that the noise/jitter due to the long cable is getting to the point where it is significant to sonics, and changes in playback runtime (processing, disk seeks whatever) are causing a change in that noise/jitter which becomes audible. On the short or Optics cable the runtime differences are small enough they are not audible without the extra noise/jitter from the cable.

So I think its pretty well determined that from a bit perspective they are identical, but that under some circumstances in some systems there is an audible difference durring playback.

What I don't think we know yet is what the actual mechanisms are for those differences, there are a lot of hypothesis floating around, but testing them is going to be very tough. Especially when they are not audible in all cases.

I don't have any MACs so I have not done any tests with MAC formats. I know people that HAVE heard differences in MAC formats, but I did not take part in those tests.


John S.

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