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Music servers and other computer based digital audio technologies.

RE: Audiostream just chimed in with an opinion

Lets take a look at this quote from the article.

"Let's compare this to what Cookie Marenco of Blue Coast Records had to say on the Computer Audiophile forum:

About FLAC... We did a lot of early testing for FLAC because it is also less expensive for us to send when a file is smaller, but, when listening back to uncompressed FLAC against the full WAV file when both are sent through email... there is a difference and the WAV has consistently sounded better. We realize that much has been published that FLAC is bit to bit accurate, but with a listening test, this is not the case. I have suggested to many of our customers to do the experiment themselves and all have reported the same results as we have found."


Are they saying that the process of encoding and then decoding the FLAC back after E-mailing somehow DAMAGES the sound despite being bit-for-bit identical?!

This is either severe misunderstanding of the technology, faulty equipment [eg. inaccurate encode/decoding] or seriously dissonant thought processing folks. In order to accept this line of reasoning, we must also accept that there's some kind of funky "force" out there interfering with the data every time it's being manipulated. If one believes that FLAC'ing a file will do this, why not also say each time the music is transferred via IP thru E-mail or FTP or web download, the sound degrades each time because it's being chopped up into IP packets? Eventually, the sound will be so bad that we have to get back to the first generation digital file!

I love my music and really enjoy cool hardware as part of this passion. Despite this place being called the "Asylum", I trust we all still live in the same universe and strive to disseminate FACTS as best we can. I appreciate subjective opinions being relative but quotes like the above just lack commonsense (and certainly does not jive with my experience of computer equipment or listening tests).
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Archimago's Musings: A 'more objective' audiophile blog.


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