FLAC is brighter than WAV - Page 14

This poster knows enough to get into trouble, but not enough to actually understand what he's talking about. First of all, there are necessarily buffers on the soundcard to deal with this. All practical buses operate in the same asynchronous fashion. No soundcard can ever expect to get data off the bus at exactly the sample rate, and therefore there must be a (small amount of) memory on the card to buffer the data coming from the CPU. Your playback happens from this buffer. Latency is something else entirely, and also has nothing to do with sound quality. It's largely irrelevant in this context, it makes no difference to us whether there is 5ms or 100ms of delay between the decoder and the actual sound being created. The bits are the same, the DAC timing is the same (and has nothing to do with the bus timing) - where is the difference? As long as the bus is not so saturated that it can't keep the soundcard buffer full, there will be no difference whatsoever.

Also, trying to minimize transfer on the PCI bus is folly with all but the newest computers and chipsets. Most consumer motherboards up until the last year or so have only a single PCI bus that is also shared among onboard hardware like the IDE or SATA controller that he advocates the use of. Chances are very good that your IDE drive is also passing data to the CPU via the very same bus that your soundcard is on (crap, those engineers still don't know how to deal with bus sharing after 50 years). Only recently has PCIe begun gaining traction as the primary system bus, and in such cases your PCI bus is probably implemented as a bridge to PCIe - oh noes the bus is shared with the hard drive still, tragedy for sound quality! CPU interfaces are expensive to implement, and thus are generally minimized as much as possible. There will generally be one CPU->RAM bus and one CPU->I/O bus in each computer. If multiple I/O interfaces are required (ie. PCIe, PCI, USB, IDE etc.) they are all implemented on the fastest bus available using a bridge or controller where appropriate.

Finally, if your soundcard needed to monopolize the PCI bus as much as this guy suggests, your computer would be next to useless. The bus standard provides guidelines for mastering, and the arbitrator forces bus masters to give up control of the bus when their time is up. If your soundcard can't operate properly under the constraints the bus imposes, it's broken (hello Creative with your broken bus mastering...).

Anyway, I'm feeding here...sorry...

Patrick is a visionary, I think many of his ideas are just too extreme for us to handle.

In general theory I fully agree with all of lan's statements.

aiff sounds better than anything else.
kthxbye

You're joking, right?

On the off chance that you are not joking, could you provide any plausible reason that the PCM data contained in an AIFF file would sound any different from the identical PCM data contained in a WAV file?

Are you going to answer the question?

No, I have signatures turned off.

It seemed to me to be a joke, but as the very existence of this thread demonstrates, one can never assume.

Has this thread hit rock bottom yet?

do people who claim there is no difference in digital signals because "a 1 = 1, and 0 = 0, all non erroneous digital sounds the same" also deny the existence of jitter?

I think the argument is not that there could possibly be variations in stored digital data itself, but that the transport and handling processes they are subjected to might be fundamentally flawed from an audiophile perspective? fwiw

edit:
this pretty much answers my question above and is what I speculated as far as how the timing could be affected.. however I think science and humanity as a whole is far from understanding anything completely, especially myself

All the time arguing back and forth could have been better spent working to earn money to buy VINYL which is better than WAV in the first place.

Seriously, if FLAC ain't good enough for you, then dont use it. If WAV ain't good enough for you, then you're probably not suited for digital audio. Go get a turntable and some steve hoffman records.

Yes, I totally agree. I wrote that thread because this topic is not far from that. We have laid out many, simple, thorough, testing solutions for Patrick - none of which have even been recognized.

Prime95, Orthos, Super-PI... all of these would report any errors that Patrick believes he is receiving.

Unless something is setup terribly strange, music remains digital until getting to the DAC. If there are no errors in the above mentioned programs then there is NO influence from any of the electrical components in the computer.

If he is getting errors reported back from these programs, there is a TERRIBLE problem with some piece of hardware - CPU, memory, power supply... Usually you'll see errors being reported on heavily overclocked systems.

Error correction on modern hardware is too good to leave any room for influence of any form.

Getting back to the FLAC vs Wav thing, which this topic was originally about, I still have strong doubts that they are at all different. I've done a lot of research on different compression techniques and FLAC seems bit-perfect.

Oh come on now.. how much difference can there possibly be between decoding FLAC and passing the PCM data to the sound card, and just getting the PCM out of the WAV and passing it to the sound card???

Issues there set aside, there is no possible explanation. FLAC is lossless. It's been proven. Take a WAV, get its MD5, or any other hash. FLAC it at whatever compression level you care. Decode it. Get the MD5. It's going to be... drum roll... EXACTLY the same. Hence the word "lossless". There are no ifs ands or buts about it.

I find it very hard to believe that the strain imposed upon your system by decoding FLAC is affecting audio quality in any way. By that measure, running your CPU at 100% (say encoding video in the background at idle priority) while listening to FLAC would sound very noticeably bad, which is simply not the case.

You are just imagining things. Sorry.

~MiSfit

You have absolutely no idea about how a CPU works, how much load a FLAC file is placing on said CPU chip, and the dynamics of your computer system.

You, my friend, have way too much time on your hands.

AND HOW!


This is so simple it never should have gotten past 2 or 3 posts. Here goes. When you download a 'zip' file with pictures from an email, you are compressing the images. When you UN-ZIP them you are restoring to original resolution/size/pixel count/etc. When you view them, you are ONLY viewing the unzipped file. You can not view the compressed format. PERIOD.
The same goes for Flac/ALAC and WAV. You take a WAV, compress it, then as it is being played back, through the buffer length it is uncompressed back to the EXACT IDENTICAL TWIN FILE YOU STARTED OUT WITH. You are in effect, listening to WAV.

I don't understand what is so goddang complicated to understand about this.

Those extra 3% CPU load make it brighter--what is so goddang complicated to understand about this?

Patrick, I think you should not use the computer as your source, period. For all you know, an antivirus check may suddenly start in the background, and CPU utilization may even get to about 10% or so... then your forehead will get very, VERY cold... you may not even have enough time to feel fatigue and realize that something is wrong, and something bad may happen. Think about your health! Ditch the computer!