Converting my CD Collection from .FLAC to .WAV


Lately I have begun converting my CD collection from .flac files to uncompressed .wav files. on the theory that doing away with a computing step in my transport and dac might improve playback sound. In some cases it does so quite unequivocally. Especially, there is a slight de-glaring of female vocals and horns. James Taylor's voice on October Road is now less shouty. Listening in general feels more relaxed and paced. SRV's guitar jangle is less rankling at times. Julian Bream's lute is less smacking.

Most of the websites from which I download files now offer only MP3 and.flac. In the old days they offered .wav too - understandble since download time and server space cost money.

What say you, knaves?

bolong

Ok - good comments. It needs to be reiterated here though that the proposed reason for converting to .wav is to theoretically eliminate the process of conversion in the transport or DAC - the idea being that the file conversion on the fly inside your gear is potentially adding noise.

What transport and Dac are you using now? Which is burdened with the conversion and what processors are in the circuit? Depending on how the circuit is designed it may not handle this extra step without robbing you of something else (which you’ve eluded to). Are you only talking about digital downloads or previous CD rips? 

Digital downloads.

Jay's Audio CDT mk2 Transport

Denafrips Terminator R2R ladder Dac

 

Got it. You have nice equipment- should sound good. JRiver’s conversion to WAV is done in memory (as I’m sure you know) so as long as that requirement is met I don’t see it affecting your Dac. I agree that starting from WAV to begin with would be better as it eliminates the process entirely.

Another factor may be CD burn speed. Since music Cd's have traditionally been burned at low speeds to preserve data integrity, I reset the burn speed in Windows Media Player to "slow," and this has resulted in yet another layer of glare disappearing from CD playback. It is possible that the "fast" and even "medium" burn speeds that Windows is factory set to are too fast to guarantee absolute data integrity for music files. Of course, this also presumes that the flac files I am downloading were also recorded at a speed slow enough to preserve data integrity.