CD Ripping software

No it's not a must. A FLAC file has the same data. It's like saying you must leave your Word files unzipped if you want the best textual quality.

No it's not a must. A FLAC file has the same data.

Sure, theoretically FLAC has the same data. In practice, there is an audible difference between all lossless formats, and comparing them to uncompressed WAV or AIFF, at least to my ears in my system.

Best wishes,
Alex Peychev

If you are really hearing audible differences I'd say there was something wrong with your playback chain, not with the format.

Something wrong with my playback chain? Are you serious? :-)

I think Robin Whittle explains it well:

"Audio files contain a certain amount of information - "entropy" - so they cannot be compressed losslessly to any size smaller than that. So it is not realistic to expect an ever-increasing improvement in lossless compression algorithm performance. The performance can only approach more closely whatever the basic entropy of the file is. No-one quite knows what that entropy is of course . . . I think that would require understanding the datastream in a way which is exactly in tune with it's true nature. For instance a .jpg image of handwriting would appear to contain a lot of data, unless you could see and recognise the handwriting and record its characters in a suitably compressed format. The true nature of sound varies with its source, physical environment and recording method, and a lossless compression program cannot adapt itself entirely to the "true" nature of the sound in each piece of music. Therefore it is not surprising that different algorithms work best on different kinds of music."

Lossless? Not that I think so! :-)

Best wishes,
Alex Peychev

The text you quote doesn't mean what you seem to think it means. He's talking about how much we can compress a stream, and indeed the amount of FLAC compression possible depends on the type of data in audio files. He's not saying that FLAC does some kind of violence to the data that WAV does not do. FLAC compression is still a completely lossless process, as one can easily verify oneself by repeatedly compressing and decompressing the same file and comparing the PCM data.

FLAC decompression takes place at the application level. The same data gets sent to the soundcard driver whether originating from a WAV, AIFF, or FLAC file. (Jitter is not an issue at this level as long as the application can supply the data fast enough.)

Now some people will blame the difference on the processor load, but decoding of 24/96 FLAC files takes up only a few percent of total CPU load at real-time audio processing rates. And processor load is constantly fluctuating from second to second and minute to minute, so one would expect audio performance to be pretty arbitrary if playback was this delicate.