Why do Wav and Flac Files Sound Different?

@erik_squires

Maybe I’m reading something into your last message, but can you explain what HDCP has to do with FLAC v. WAV?

I’m not trying to hassle you, this is an honest question posed to an obviously knowledgable colleague.

FWIW, this is a topic long of interest to me. I wrote some lengthy articles about digital copy-protection the topic for mainstream tech publications back when the first round of DVD CP standards emerged, and at the time, HDCP’s only application for audio had to do with DVD-Audio media (and then hirez SACD DSD-encoded stereo).

I understand that today HDCP is incorporated into HDMI/DVI/etc.-transported signals, but that would not distinguished between FLAC & uncompressed PCM content.

Btw, +1 re: your comments about metadata being processed independently of digital-audio content. Jeez. Yes, nothing’s impossible, but Sagan’s Law ("extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof") applies here.

D

@stilljd - The FLAC compression levels are aspirational. Think of them more as setting how much time to spend attempting to compress a song, more than how much they will compress a song.

That is, as you increase FLAC compression it spends more and more time to compress the data, but may not actually be able to do so.

@cundare2 No offense is taken.

HDCD was a way of encoding a variety of features into a 44.1 kHz/16 bit signal, most famously it was a way of encoding 24 bit data into 16 bits. This compression did in fact affect the original music, in the sense that the original 44.1 kHz/16 signal was no longer bit identical as it now had information encoded about dynamic range. HDCD was complex and encoded more features than just this.

MQA is also not a bit-perfect conversion. It attempts to encode in a low resolution signal (44.1/48.1, etc) high resolution content (96 kHz/24, or higher).

In the case of HDCD or MQA you are left with 44.1 kHz/16 bit data which is no longer bit-perfect of the original.

On the other hand, ALAC, FLAC and WAV formats though result in exactly the same bit-perfect signal resulting from decoding their files. Conversion between them to each other should result in exactly the same set of 44.1 kHz/16 bit data streams (if that’s what you started with). How they handled metadata might be different but in all cases the metadata is NOT encoded into the music stream.

this is ludacris wav and flac sound identical. flac is completely lossless it uses an on the fly decompression 

wav does not contain metadata while flac does there are absolutely 0 advantages with wav.

we have been dealing with computer audio servers and streamers fo over 10 years

Dave and Troy

audio Intellect NJ

Streaming specialists

Now you tell me Dave and Troy !. After the OP  I re ripped all 400 CDs to wave.  Now I have to re-rip back to FLAC so I can have cover art again.   

I wish you guys would make up my mind.  Maybe I'll just wait for the thread to stop and count the votes and then do that.  😏 

wav does not contain metadata while flac does

Um, beg to differ.  You are correct in that the existence of album art or metadata should make no difference to a properly behaving streamer.  Perhaps @audiotroy  you are conflating album art with metadata?  I just converted a file from FLAC to WAV and it had artist, album, year of release, etc. but the album art did not make it over.

I found this interesting article on album art however, and it seems this is a rather new capability for WAV files.

Important to note that some metadata is required for WAV and FLAC as it describes the data in the audio data container that explains how the stream of bytes should be interpreted.  Floating point vs. integer, number of channels, sample rate, etc. is all necessary for WAV files and part of the file format definition you may read more about here.

There is a second, optional part of metadata associated with human legible, descriptive tags.  Not actually needed to play a file, but certainly needed to organize a music library.