[castleofargh]

I'm rusty on this. So both the regular output and the upsample to 192 output on that DAC are bitperfect?

Bitperfect is typically used to talk about ASIO and WASAPI on the computer, which are the streaming options you pick to go from your audio player to the DAC. Once inside the DAC, all bets are off. And if we’re being rigorous, you could still manage to oversample, EQ, or change the volume before sending the result through ASIO if you really wanted it. Technically, the route to the DAC(ASIO) would still be called bitperfect as it only concerns the route. What goes on before, or after in the DAC, is a different story and the bit perfection is not in guaranteed anywhere else when you use ASIO(ironically, my current ASIO drivers oversample to the max the DAC can handle).

Think of it as something similar to 'lossless' for an audio format. FLAC is lossless. But if I convert some 24/96.wav to 16/44 flac, is this lossless? Yet Brutus says FLAC is lossless, and sure, he is an honorable man.





DACs aren’t bit perfect. They make the signal analog for one. But even on the digital side, it would be a mistake by modern fidelity standards to apply no processing whatsoever (oversampling, noise shaping, some digital filtering and really anything that’s been found to help somewhere, like with jitter).

 

[mbphotox]

isn't FLAC referring to lossless compression?

 

[Ferdinando1968]

The compression from PCM to FLAC is lossless compared to what you supply as input…
obviously if you alter the original input PCM before generating the FLAC, you will not get back the original PCM before it is 'altered'.

It is not so ?

 

[castleofargh]

isn't FLAC referring to lossless compression?

My apparently missed point was that those are big words but they only concern integrity of data in a specific context. They don’t protect data everywhere forever.

 

[OnlySoMany]

isn't FLAC referring to lossless compression?

Having heard the same albums ripped using flac and wav, I prefer wav. It just has the slightest bit more to my ears.

 

[gregorio]

isn't FLAC referring to lossless compression?

Yes it is but that’s only in reference to the data we input into the flac algorithm and the data we get out of it, not what happens before or after that point. What we get out of the flac algorithm is exactly what we put in, no bits are lost or changed, so we call it “lossless”. What happens to those bits after they’re output by the algorithm is a different story though, in fact it’s required that they’re changed in the DAC in order to fulfil the rules/laws that govern digital audio and give us back the analogue signal we started with.

Having heard the same albums ripped using flac and wav, I prefer wav. It just has the slightest bit more to my ears.

Assuming you’re ripping/inputting a wav into the flac encoder, then the output of the flac decoder will be exactly the same wav. So effectively you’re saying you prefer wav over wav (an identical wav).

G

 

[chesebert]

Having heard the same albums ripped using flac and wav, I prefer wav. It just has the slightest bit more to my ears.

wav and flac will sound the same if you uncompress flac and send to your streamer as a PCM stream.

 

[castleofargh]

Having heard the same albums ripped using flac and wav, I prefer wav. It just has the slightest bit more to my ears.

It’s likely that you know what’s being played and nothing in your "experiment" establishes when you’re wrong about perceiving a change.

Or you could have encoded with extra settings for flac?

The other less likely possibility, as flac decoded properly makes the same data as wav, would be that your player is defective. I’ve never noticed/encountered that for flac, and it’s now been around for long enough so that it’s a simple formality to use it right. But I did twice with mp3 being badly decoded sometimes for different reasons(and after alerting the maker about the issue, an update fixed it).

I guess we can also mention the ultimate excuse when something digital feels different even though it shouldn’t; noise. I say excuse because instead of being verified and demonstrated as audible, the idea of noise coming from somewhere and affecting how a DAC or computer works, is more often used as a joker once every other vague hypothesis has been disproved.
Obviously, there will be situations where noise directly or indirectly makes a significant difference to the outgoing sound. But how often does it happen compared to how often someone uses noise as his last plausible excuse without verifying anything about the amount of noise in his setup or it’s audible impact?

Just like with DACs sounding different, what does it really takes to claims something as true? I got told to believe that strong confidence should come from a strong demonstration, not from a strong ego.
That makes me fun at parties.

 

[OnlySoMany]

wav and flac will sound the same if you uncompress flac and send to your streamer as a PCM stream.

Learn something new every day

 

[OnlySoMany]

It’s likely that you know what’s being played and nothing in your "experiment" establishes when you’re wrong about perceiving a change.

Or you could have encoded with extra settings for flac?

The other less likely possibility, as flac decoded properly makes the same data as wav, would be that your player is defective. I’ve never noticed/encountered that for flac, and it’s now been around for long enough so that it’s a simple formality to use it right. But I did twice with mp3 being badly decoded sometimes for different reasons(and after alerting the maker about the issue, an update fixed it).

I guess we can also mention the ultimate excuse when something digital feels different even though it shouldn’t; noise. I say excuse because instead of being verified and demonstrated as audible, the idea of noise coming from somewhere and affecting how a DAC or computer works, is more often used as a joker once every other vague hypothesis has been disproved.
Obviously, there will be situations where noise directly or indirectly makes a significant difference to the outgoing sound. But how often does it happen compared to how often someone uses noise as his last plausible excuse without verifying anything about the amount of noise in his setup or it’s audible impact?

Just like with DACs sounding different, what does it really takes to claims something as true? I got told to believe that strong confidence should come from a strong demonstration, not from a strong ego.
That makes me fun at parties.

I may be wrong, but isn't FLAC bit and data limited compared to wav?

 

[Ferdinando1968]

I may be wrong, but isn't FLAC bit and data limited compared to wav?

What you mean for ‘data limited’ ?

Anyway, take a look here, it’s very interesting read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLAC

The FLAC compression algorithm is similar to (for example) ZIP, but specialized on compressing audio stream.

 

[gregorio]

I may be wrong, but isn't FLAC bit and data limited compared to wav?

Yes, that’s the point. Oversimplified: Let’s say you have a wav file that contains a data sequence that’s 00000, 111111. We could write/encode that as say 5x0, 6x1 which uses less data and when we decode it we get exactly the same 00000, 111111 back.

G

 

[jasonb]

I can tell that the Qudelix 5K sounds to thin and clinical. I’m assuming it’s because of the ESS DAC chip. Sometimes I even prefer just an Apple dongle over it, and I definitely prefer the audio straight from the headphone jack of my M1 MacBook Air over the 5K.