WAV versus FLAC

Yes that is some what my point. If there is a difference in the formats it will be at the extreme highend of the frequency. Not sure many of us really (myself included) here it anyway.

I guess my point is the difference is very small, and our systems (and ears) have much bigger issues.

I know my system does not put out anything above 17khz. With Sennhizer 650 headphones I hear to 19 but on my speakers it is dead after 17khz.

Why is the only difference in formats evident in the high end extremes? I've never heard that before. What are you basing that statement on?

The difference between your speakers and headphones, beyond the obvious limitations of the specific transducers, is one of isolation. Your speakers abilities are profoundly affected by the room, the contents, your seating position, etc. Those factors have no effect on headphones, which have a much greater degree of isolation. That's probably why they don't use speakers to test your hearing.

BTW Sennheiser HD650's are not known for their upper-end extension. In that region between 10-20khz they drop down severely just after 10khz averaging around -15db! At 19khz they are -10db.

Uncompressed is lossless is uncompressed.

Well, I did some research and turns out there are more people discussing this issue with FLAC because they also hear disadvantages against WAV.

There was a claim of more RAM and more processor power involved with FLAC decoding compared to WAV. So I ripped the same CD track to FLAC (compression level 5) and WAV and played one after the other while monitoring Windows resource monitor. In both cases (FLAC and WAV) the processor remained at 3-4% and RAM at 10-12MB, so the above claim is not true.

Anyway, the difference between FLAC and WAV is subtle but clearly audible (to my ears, in my system).
WAV has better decay (more air), better top and bottom extension; it overall sounds more natural. This is best audible with a well recorded piano material. Violins and large orchestra reveal it too.

There were suggestions of first extracting FLAC to WAV and then play it. I haven't tried that so far. Does anyone around here know a reasonable way of first converting FLAC to WAV before playback?

Best,
Alex Peychev

Ballywho, what? Mp3 is uncompressed! AAC is uncompressed? Both are quite lossy! Not everything uncompressed is lossless; not everything lossless is uncompressed.

I agree 100% with Alex Peychev; to me WAV has that "live" sound that AIFF or FLAC just doesn't convey. Dunno why; I suspect the decoding is more than we think (at elast for FLAC) It's a curse, really, cuz WAV sucks as a metadata manager.

Alex, btw, sorry I couldn't come by that evening for a listen. I want to hear that DAC!!!

There were suggestions of first extracting FLAC to WAV and then play it. I haven't tried that so far. Does anyone around here know a reasonable way of first converting FLAC to WAV before playback?

I'm on a Mac and use Max software to do those kinds of conversions. It seems you are on a PC, in which case Media Monkey should do a fine job converting FLAC to WAV (or anything else). EAC would be a good solution.

That said, I just took your suggestion, Alex, and ripped three files of a well recorded piano piece. I took the first cut from, Bach on a Steinway, and tried three different rips (none are conversions these are all direct rips from the CD). The first was a rip via iTunes to Macs uncompressed format, AIFF. The next rip was via Max to FLAC. Finally I ripped the same cut to WAV using Max. With the iTunes rip "Error Correction" was on. With the Max rips, the much more vigorous "CD Paranoia" error correction was set to "Full Paranoia". Those rips took much longer than the iTunes rip did. I listened via headphones since that would seem to really pronounce any differences pretty unmistakably. I thought the WAV and FLAC ripped with Max sounded a bit better than the AIFF via iTunes but I could not say for sure that I could identify those two every time. I did not believe I was hearing any difference between the WAV and FLAC ripped with Max. YMMV, of course. I'll try it with some other files and if the results are different I'll chime in again.