Why do Wav and Flac Files Sound Different?

I’m a long-time analog guy and I know it annoys some of my fellow analogists when I say this, but I can make 24/96 digital files from LPs from my VPI/SME V/ARC Ref Phono 2SE that are spookily faithful. I don’t think anyone could tell them apart.

Even Michael Fremer may be coming around.

@bolong

WAV has always had the ability to have metadata it just wasn’t well supported as an official standard. This changed over time.

Qobuz downloads now embed the cover art and metadata into each track for WAV or FLAC. You can strip all metadata from an entire folder of music files using dbpoweramp tag editor. Just highlight all files and open (right click …) in tag editor, then delete all rows of metadata and cover art. You don’t have to do it for each track.

It would be interesting to see if the resulting cd burnt with ‘clean’ WAV files sound any different from one using the tagged WAV files.

@m2team00

Same. I did 1200 cd’s with dbpoweramp back in 2009 and it took 3-4 months.

I was gonna go full OCD and use Exactaudiocopy but would have killed myself ripping that many cd’s at 1:1 speed. Too difficult. Dbpoweramp does it all and I still use it all the time.

Thanks for the suggestions. I am assuming that stripping the folder of all metadata means the CD cannot be used in a manner such that individual songs can be called up by my transport, i.e, the whole file becomes a monolith that can only be played from start to finish of the album without the ability to call up individual tracks.