Why do Wav and Flac Files Sound Different?

I think that in order to get a productive discussion, could be good to have some mark of reference. The article goes back to 2016 and many things have changed since then.

Can you tell us about your experiencia?

Do you feel some difference when playing different formats: WAV, FLAC, ALAC, indeed mp3? Have you tried different "apps" to play your files: JRiver, Audirvana, Roon, ....?

Do you feel any difference playing the same file with metadata and totally stripped from metadata?

@bolong You can have the image "embedded" in each track as FLAC allows it, in fact you can put a different image in each track of a "disc". If you try any tagger (I use Tag Editor) you will see that and you can also delete the image for each track if you want. When you use a program like JRiver, Audirvana, Roon, ..... to play the files they can work in two ways: choosing the "folder / disc" image over the track image or the contrary.

If one the images is missing, they will choose the one that exists. And if there is no one, no image will appear.

Regarding your question: if you burn your CD (physical disc) as a real CD the tracks are transcoded to WAV and the images are not included in the process. 

@aldnorab You are opening another big and old discussion.

On one side, when hard disk space was not such a a commodity as it is today, people tried to reduce the size of the music files as much as possible. That implies the use of algorithms to "fold" them.

But also implies the use of algorithms to "unfold" them just in the fly while or just before being played. This implies the use of processing capacity of the computer ant that means noise.

Again, in the "old" times, this operation could demand a slightly significative "effort" for the computer. Today you can say that this "noise" is absolutely negligible. It will depend on your computer (streamer, server or whatever)

If you are curious, play the same file / track as FLAC level 0 and level 8 and trust your ears: I think you can use any transcoder to do ver both FLAC files.

And my advice: once you have tested this in YOUR equipment and with YOUR ears, forget it: there will always be people saying that they hear the difference in their equipment and there will always be people saying that with the computer of such equipment is "scientifically" imposible to feel any difference.

@aldnorab I do not know and it is not important regarding quality of the audio file.

A "song" can be transcoded as many time as you want and no "musical" information is gonna be missed (remember we are in digital world and information means 1s and 0s)

This is assuming that you transcode among lossless formats: ALAC, FLAC, AIFF, WAV and any other: so streaming company can receive a WAV file from the majors and transcode it to FLAC as it is the most "commercial" one

The only thing that could be lost is metadata (like image, composer, group, orchestra, year, ....)

Regarding your question, I guess that they supply FLAC because is universal: can be played in almost any system and has a very good capacity for metadata. Anyway the streaming company can receive a WAV file from the majors and transcode it to FLAC as it is the most "commercial" one. But honestly, I do not know.

@bolong I do not know for every case. What I have seen when I have bought music from Qobuz is that they provide an image that you can see in the FOLDER where the music is and when I have retagged every SONG FILE in order to add information important for me, sometimes there was the same image in each song file. The same applies in the case of music that I have bought from other online shops (Presto, Highresaudio, etc.)

For each song the cover art and all metadata is "separated" from "music" in each MUSIC FILE: for understanding this, it helped me very much to realize that all the information (music, song name, duration, composer, singer, orchestra, group, ...) is a very long row of 1s and 0s but similar to a very long train, the 1s and 0s for music are in one big wagon, and metadata goes in one or two or three small wagons. Following this idea, WAV only admits one metadata wagon whilst FLAC, ALAC, AIFF admit all the wagons. Metadata wagons can be full, empty or something in between

Please, this is not "scientific" at all, but this idea helped me very much. I hope it can be useful for you and not confusing.