Here is a question for everyone though. In the 21st century, where storage and bandwidth are dirt cheap, why for the love of Mozart, Frank Zappa, and The Who does anyone use ANY form of compression?............There is absolutely no good technical reason to use any compression at all.
....when i made a 1 gb virtual hard drive from my pc’s ram memory and import audio into the virtual ram drive and play the audio from the ram the sound quality is improved 100% like listening to the studio master tape can somebody explain this? This is the same thing when you play a file stored in SSD that isn’t noisy as in HDD. Try to change to SSD and you’ll be impressed even on a noisy computer.
Yes, even FLAC level 0 is compressed.
nor have I heard a difference between WAV (no compression) and FLAC.
As I’ve ripped ~ 120 CD tracks from my ~ 3500 CD collection-but only to uncompressed WAV files using an on version of EAC and mostly before I ever heard of FLAC-like s2000cr and ddafoe I’ve been trying to learn why do so many folks at hydrogenaudio, steve hoffman, audiogon and most everywhere else choose FLAC over WAV for lossless CD ripping.
Deliberately adding compression implies at least a risk of loss in audio dynamic range, clearly taboo among audio enthusiasts, even if applied only after the original analog signal was expertly digitized, ideally, to the highest practical resolution. But I bow to those here and elsewhere with much more technical knowledge who say that so long as the encoding and decoding algorithms are correctly calculated and implemented in particular software, then the signal your DAC receives will sound in every way as good as an uncompressed WAV rip of the same CD track.
Still, as we three have asked, with TB sized HDD (and even tape based https://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/why-the-future-of-data-storage-is-still-magnetic-tape ) storage being relatively cheap, why resort to a file format using any compression? I understand that the advantage of FLAC over WAV is that it internally creates a CRC (?) number upon its being saved, which allows for bit error checking. And that metadata (CD album art?) can be saved to it. But that said, compare an UNcompressed FLAC file, one containing said data plus the entire ripped CD album, with an uncompressed WAV file holding the same CD album, though unable to create and carry a CRC number and metadata. Then, as I often rip and save just three or less songs from an album, we delete 9 of the 12 saved album tracks. How much bigger than the uncompressed WAV file would be the uncompressed FLAC file?
In any case, even if there wasn’t much of a size difference I could see why those who would want to insure bit perfect rips (certainly me) and/or insist on having album art as part of the file would opt for FLAC.
But is FLAC also preferred among most of our community because its checksum capability allows for bit accurate verification via the AccurateRip database? Please confirm and elaborate as I am still a newbie on this.
And what are the user steps-in EAC and/or in dbpoweramp-for doing checksum comparisons of the CRC number of a particular CD track from a particular album you’ve ripped and the CRC number of the track in the AccurateRip database?
Lastly, would asking if there are better sounding FLAC decoders than others be a silly question? That is, while the ubiquitous ProTools DAW platform (with its arguably less than SOTA A/D converters) doesn’t support FLAC https://duc.avid.com/showthread.php?t=398498 would decoders in JRiver, dbpoweramp and Amarra be identical to those in Samplitude DAW and restoration suites like Izotope RX?
