Battery drain vs. FLAC, WAV, MP3 playback

I'm not sure about flash memory, but with HDD players, since FLAC is a larger file (more kbs per second!) it required more spins of the drive and therefore used up battery quicker.

Read somewhere before (Googled it but I can't find it) that any lossless format will drain the battery faster than a lossy format. This is because a mobile player will usually pre-load a song onto the cache memory, and preferably the next song in the playlist/album too, this way it will only access the HDD or internal flash for this. Since most DAPs - dunno if the S:Flo, HiFiMan, X3, etc etc are like this - were designed primarily for mass-marketing lossy formats (remember "1,000 songs in your pocket"?), the cache memory isn't large enough to hold the lossless track. Ergo regardless of whether you have ALAC, FLAC, WAV; or HDD vs Flash; your player will read the track from the memory source while playing it, then read the next, etc etc.

In the case of the S:Flo2 format doesn't matter much because the components eat through battery life so quickly you'd be hard pressed to see much difference!

Mine gets warm but hasn't conked out on me yet, although I don't live anywhere that's hot on top of that.

Sound-wise it won't matter since lossless is lossless, FLAC and such just provide a container for WAV (like a zip file) that keeps the size down when it's stored. I suppose WAV doesn't need anything done to it so might be less intensive, but AFAIK the actual decoding process is done ridiculously quickly by the processor and probably doesn't make much, if any difference. FLAC offers better tagging and everything and different levels of compression, so it's still the better option IMO.

That said, I'm a fairly firm believer in lossless being overkill for most portable applications unless you do most of your listening at your desktop in the quiet, so will always keep everything at 320kbps AAC/MP3 just because it's a lot smaller and given my gear, music taste and listening conditions I'd never notice any difference.

Anyway, I'd imagine someone on here will have the answer, but I think it'll probably be that the difference between different types of lossless in terms of battery life will be scant, if any.