WAV vs. AIFF

I think this was a good discussion and hopefully some of us acquired some useful information :) Love my hobby!!!

Well I had some one help me with a double blind test....

Before the test I "knew" that AIFF was the best... But I failed the test at about 50%. It was very very hard to tell any difference between lossless and AIFF. Many times I would say one sounded better than the other only to have been comparing the same track.

I used a mac min-toslink-DAC1-sennhize 650 headphones for most of the testing.

These days I don't really care if I ripp to lossless or AIFF. I have a big collection of about 26,000 songs and drive space is still not an issue. If you use and iPhone ( typing on now) or iPod lossless works out much better. If it were for home use only and AIFF give you a warm fuzzy feeling go for it.

i've compared .wav and .flac and couldn't tell the difference. the biggest issue with .wav or any file that you store on a computer is data corruption. .wav files have absolutely no built in error correction so the data can theoretically become minutely corrupted though still play and you might never know. .flac has built in error correction, if it's corrupted at all, it won't play. the pianist analogy is specious at best. any modern and well-maintained computer would have no issue decoding the data from .flac or .alac files.

Hi Kgturner, so my assertion that timing/jitter is an issue is specious, at best, huh? Perhaps the point was too subtle for you. Perhaps you just aren't good with analogies. Perhaps I explained it badly. My point is that I hear many people make statements as if the issue is getting bit perfect transmission. That is a very limited pursuit. The more difficult pursuit is to preserve the clock information.

You seem also to be a bit confused about error correction. The flac file is tolerant to errors as you point out, but that is so it can play through errors - not what you just said. The wav file is not tolerant of errors and so those errors become audible and will result in periods of noise during playback or for the file not to be playable beyond the error.

The more difficult pursuit is to preserve the clock information.

This is an interesting (and excellent) statement and also something one of the magazines touched on awhile back, I think Stereophile, who did a great article on this, I wish I could remember the issue.

Tell me if I am right, any clock data that isn't right, is what has been labeled "jitter"?

Also, I still go back to what I was trying to stress before and that is these subjective differences can be system dependant, hence why one hears a difference and another doesn't.