EdgeDC
100+ Head-Fier
You sharing the article happened while I was typing out that reply (so I didn't see it until afterwards - my completed longer reply came 2 minutes after you shared the link in one line). That being said, I do recall seeing that article before, but it was quite some time ago. I'm glad that my understanding of where the FLAC decompression occurs was indeed correct.If you read the article linked above it uses lossless Huffman coding compression combined with high freq re-quantization on high-res material, so that definitely means that FLAC decoding happens at the source, recompressed using LDAC algorithm, and uncompressed at the receiver. Which also means that even WAV file will be transmitted compressed.
The larger point - the fact that the (lossless) FLAC decoding takes place in the source, and then the (lossy) LDAC coding takes place after that, undercuts the idea that 990 kbps for LDAC is "enough" to retain lossless audio. Put another way - LDAC compression is simply not as good as FLAC... proven by the fact that the former is lossy, and the latter isn't. Of course, they have somewhat different use cases - or else LDAC would possibly be using FLAC compression to transmit.
I have nothing against lossless compression, but I'd like to avoid lossy compression wherever I can, and that means avoiding Bluetooth when SQ is most important to me... and only using Bluetooth when convenience is more important.
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