Apple Lossless vs iTunes Plus

Good thought about the New Math Jax2 but....

To me seems the issue is more likely about Placebos. That's what's really freaking me out. It's really become quite an insidious phenomena.

I watched House three nights ago and it dealt with this very infection. It was inevitably an episode with a rare sad ending for House. Dr. House went through all his usual drama and suspense with the hospital staff and the patient which took up most of the episode. In a climatic end when Dr. House finally got the diagnosis correct - patient infected with a Placebo - it was too late. The patient died from a Placebo infection. HELLO? - I think a message was sent! If House missed this I think that should serve as a wake up call for all of us!

I was talking with an enthusiast out East last week. He's part of a rather large Audio Club out there. In March they had about 30 members gathered for their monthly meet and they each did a 'Paint By Numbers' painting together. Surely if mathematics could solely be used to determine what they hear in their playback systems and that, based on identical numbers, there would be no audible difference, a 'Paint By Numbers' test would illustrate and validate that. That was indeed the assumption most of the guys at the meet had. The result? Even though all the 'Paint By Numbers' sets were identical numerically and in every other respect, there were substantial differences between the finished paintings! Most of the guys were totally and absolutely freaked! What's sad is some still desperately denied the differences.

My conclusion, and I hope others begin to see this too, is that Placebo infections are indeed more rampant and insidious than I or anyone else thought.

Let alone the other areas of our lives, in this hobby, whether we're lowly and uneducated or highly esteemed for our double E degree education, whether we use our ears or whether we use mathematics to determine what we hear, no one is immune to attack. It seems apparent that we're all susceptible to some strain of Placebo infection - especially with Spring just around the corner.

Please take URGENT HEED!

Robert
RSAD

The paint-by-numbers is a great illustration, Robert (pun not intended). Are there any pills I can take, or some kind of shot to boost my immunity to those Placebo Infections that House missed? I don't have TV so don't keep up with such informative programing :-I

Marco

Let me ask you a question, since you're convinced that they can sound different.

Take a folder full of Word documents. ZIP it. Heck, re-ZIP it several times. Extract all the files. Do your Word documents look different? Did the formatting change? What about the letters? Did new words get inserted, or some others deleted?

No?

Lossless media compression works in the same way as lossless file compression does, excepting optimizations for seeking/scrubbing and streaming; things that aren't necessary with whole-file compression. At no point does a lossless compression algorithm discard data as irrelevant (that it can't reconstruct later during the decompression). This is unlike AAC or MP3 where temporal filters are applied and resolution discarded depending on variables like bitrate, profile, etc.

The same is true for PNG image files that is true of FLAC or ALAC audio files. No matter how times you compress or decompress a PNG file, all the original image data stays preserved accurately and faithfully. That's what makes it a lossless format.

By claiming that ALAC vs. FLAC vs. even AIFF or WAV can, or even will, sound different is to claim that the compression format isn't lossless. That is exactly the claim you're making, that ALAC and/or FLAC are losing data. This is very, very easy to test for.

- Take a raw uncompressed WAV or AIFF.
- Encode it as FLAC or ALAC (doesn't matter which, but you can try both).
- Decode it back to an uncompressed WAV or AIFF (which ever you started with).
- Perform a diff on the original compared to the compressed/decompressed file.
- You will note that there are no differences marked.

Why? Because at the binary format level of the file, everything was preserved in the process of compressing and decompressing. Which is precisely what makes it lossless.

Anyway, these tests for binary preservation are very easy to perform, and they don't require golden-ears, esoteric audio equipment, or belief in the wafting hands of some sound-spirit. A very basic computer, a WAV or AIFF file, and a program that can encode/decode FLAC and/or ALAC, and a simple binary diff program (lots of free and opensource ones) will do the trick. Any Mac or modern Linux machine will come with all the necessary tools, and any Windows PC can have the requisite software setup in a few minutes.

Cheers!

Let me ask you a question, since you're convinced that they can sound different.

Take a folder full of Word documents. ZIP it. Heck, re-ZIP it several times. Extract all the files. Do your Word documents look different? Did the formatting change? What about the letters? Did new words get inserted, or some others deleted?

We are not talking about a Word file. It does not have to be converted in the same way to convey timing information as well as content through various electronic devices to an electromechanical device. Regardless of your reasoning, my ears tell me different. I cannot explain it beyond that. I am not an expert in such matters by any stretch of the imagination. My friend did a rip via EAC to WAV and converted that rip to ALAC in iTunes. We compared that to a rip of the same tune directly via iTunes to ALAC. I can tell you with high certainty that on my system I could identify the files blindly 10/10 times. My friend felt the same way on his (very resolving) system. Yet in theory they should be bit-for-bit identical files. I can upload those two files should you care to compare them yourself and see if you agree, or you could try the same experiment if you have EAC and iTunes. On my office system, which is far less resolving, I could not tell the difference at all in the two files. There's plenty of discussions on similar topics on this and other sites. Choose whatever you'd like to believe, and use whatever works for you. I get your reasoning, and on face value it looks good on the page, but in real life, to my ears, it doesn't work that way. Enjoy the music!

Timing information? You pull down the audio from a CD into a WAV, the timing information is encoded as samples in the WAV file. The exact same samples are encoded into the FLAC or ALAC.

Timing information discrepancies are going to come from how your hardware deals with the PCM data, well after the software encode/decode stages. The PCM data itself will be binary-identical.

Can you explain to me how two binary-identical PCM data sets can sound different? Unless your hardware is locking on to one signal at 44.1 khz and the other at something not-44.1 khz (48, 96, etc.) they will sound the same.

You can believe that you can tell the difference 10/10 times. Fundamentals of mathematics and computer science prove unequivocally that you cannot in reality do so, regardless of what you believe. This is evident by lossless video, lossless image, and lossless _insert_filetype_ methods elsewhere that repeatedly and accurately reproduce the source from the compressed format. Audio is not special in this regard. Audiophilia is however.

FLAC and ALAC are either lossless, or they are not. If they are lossless, then they will produce identical results. If they are not, then they will have differences. So, simply test for wether or not they are lossless (as I outlined before). You can perform this test empirically and objectively, quite easily disproving subjective differences as bias.