WAV or Apple Lossless Encoder?

Hi Mark,

To answer your questions about why different yet equal file types exist: the world of IT is notoriously poor at deciding on a standard format and everyone wants it to be their own. Compression that occurs to a file such as WAV -> Flac could only have noticeable playback differences if you're streaming from a early 1990's computer with about 16 megs of RAM. People report differences for one psychosomatic reason or another, but those who do are rarely, if ever, conducting an actual scientific (ABX) test. This is the reason why most audiophiles don't use v2 or v0 even though they would not be able to differentiate it from lossless. Storage is cheap, and if you have money to burn, then by all means use FLAC, but the economy for those trained in engineering is not exactly doing well right now so I am spending those few hundred dollars on parts upgrades instead ;-)

For those who don't believe me and think they can tell the difference between two lossless formats, test it for yourself to see that they're identical if that is what will give you peace of mind. Then test a v0 MP3 and then a v2 while you're at it to realize how good audio engineering has gotten in the past few years. If you test it, however, make sure the volume is equalized and that you're not using replay gain.

If those of you who think that Apple lossless and wav files sound different I would suggest the following - rip the wav file with one ripper and the Apple lossless with iTunes. Then convert the Apple lossless to wav and compare the files bit for bit - EAC and foobar both have facilities for doing this. If you use EAC for the wav file you need to account for the disk offset that EAC uses. When I have tried this I find that the files are bit for bit identical. Note - EAC wav files may be different if they are ripped from a damaged disk, but from a clean disk the 2 processes will produce the same bits.

I believe it is possible to still hear differences from different formats but it will be because of some other issue in the playback chain, not the bits in the file. For example, a wav file played with foobar and an Apple lossless file played with iTunes may differ based on how the 2 players deal with the audio subsystem - for example using ASIO to bypass KMixer with foobar but going through KMixer with iTunes. With the Wadia those differences should not be as important.

It is pretty easy to convert from one lossless format to another, so once you have ripped your library you should be able to change to other formats as you wish. Tagging is the main issue then, but that can be handled for a few hundred CDs. Many think EAC is the best ripper, although it can be slower than others. I found that EAC and iTunes produced the same files for the CDs I compared, but they were in pretty good shape.

I would suggest doing lots of experiments with a few CDs you know really well. Figure out what works best for you then do the rest of the CDs. Once you have a good rip in any lossless format you should never have to rip again.

I think everyone should try this at home and report the results... I was alerted to this by a leading manufacturer of PC audio related gear (who can identify himself), and found it to be true. Here is the test:

1) Burn a song from a clean CD to a wav file using EAC (this is now very easy to do, the software is free, downloadable, and very user friendly).

2) Import that wav file into Itunes and convert it to an apple lossless file (you need your default import setting set to lossless to do this).

3) Using the same CD, rip the same song directly into Itunes in lossless format using error correction.

4) Compare the two lossless files.

I've done this, and I was astonishly saddened to hear the results (because I ripped all my music in lossless). The lossless file generated through Itunes had less seperation b/t instruments (poorer imaging), sounded slightly less "alive", and (I believe) more "smearing" of the sound. I haven't done this yet, but I wonder if the same observation would be made through an Itunes generated WAV file vs. an Itunes generated lossless file.

I'm convinced this is real. I asked a non-audiophile friend to do the same listening comparison, told her nothing about what she was hearing, and she made the same observations. Marco (Jax2) will do the test tonight.

WE DO NEED DATA, AND I THINK THE MOST CREDIBLE SOURCE IS MULTIPLE PEOPLE DOING THIS COMPARISON. PLEASE DO YOURS TODAY :) - AND REPORT BACK WHAT YOU FIND.

Peter, You have good ears. I have been ripping to Apple Lossless for a few years and I always thought they sounded the same as WAV or AIFF. But a few months ago I experimented something similar to what you did. I ripped some CDs to AIFF using iTunes, converted them to Apple Lossless, burned two sets of CDs: one directly from AIFF, another one directly from Apple Lossless. I than played them back from CD player. Some tracks from the Apple Lossless ones sounded thin and some with narrower soundstage and not as dynamic. It didn't happen on all the tracks but the ones did sound different were very obvious, even my non-audiophile friends can point that out immediately.

The Apple Lossless format didn't loss any information because when I converted them back to AIFF and compare them to the original AIFF files, they were identical. That lead me to believe that the one-step conversion process during CD burning may have introduced artifacts.

Interesting observations.

Sidssp - Did you try ripping the tracks that sounded different on the burned CDs and comparing them to each other and to the original ripped tracks? It would be interesting to see if the bits are different. If so, then the burning process may be the issue - which I think is what I think you concluded.

Peter_S What do you think caused the differences you hear? Do you agree if the bits are the same, the files should sound the same? If so, you might want to compare the actual files bit by bit. It is certainly possible that there is some error in the conversion process. You could compare the Apple lossless files with a file compare utility like fc/b, although it is pretty crude. You can also convert the Apple lossless to wav and compare those files using EAC or foobar. As I said above, when I ripped tracks to Apple lossless with iTunes and converted them to wav and compared to EAC ripped tracks, they were identical. Have not tried a bit compare after doing a wav to Apple lossless conversion but could try it. Also you could convert the Apple lossless lossless file that was converted from the EAC wav file back to wav and compare it to the original EAC wav file to see if the round trip introduced differences. EAC has a good comparison routine, although you have to set the disk offsets to 0 when ripping with EAC to do the comparison. Another interesting thing to do is to take the EAC wav and a iTunes ripped Apple lossless file converted to wav and use the ABX facility in foobar to do a blind test of the two files. Much harder to do comparisons with iTunes. (I don't want to get into a discussion of blinding testing - just wanted to point out the utility in foobar.)