Why do Wav and Flac Files Sound Different?

@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. 

It may help to think of an audio file as having 3 parts:

• Metadata needed to read the byte stream and it’s location in the file
• Optional metadata about the recording (Composer, artist, year of release, lyrics, album art)
• The music data byte stream

Each of these chunks of information are entirely separate in the file, so as @audiotroy points out, the existence or absence of album art should make zero difference to the DAC.

The byte stream presented to the DAC should be identical regardless of optional metadata or indeed file format (FLAC, WAV, ALAC, etc.).

The one possible/plausible area I can see FLAC vs. WAV causing a difference is with poor streamers that don’t implement decompression (FLAC or ALAC) with adequate buffering and that somehow the time taken to decompress each chunk is affecting the rate at which samples are presented to the DAC. IMHO, this is possible, but certainly signs of poor design, not a feature of the file format.

If there IS a difference in a file because it has or does not have album art that would be a significant functional error/bug.

To end with a metaphor, imagine a vinyl record. The metadata is the text on the label. The cover art is on the cardboard sleeve, and the byte stream is the music in the groves. If you can hear a difference in an album because of the sleeve art you really have surpassed the boundaries of human capabilities.