[BlackDog]

Good evening.
This question has been probably asked a gazillion times before, but I just cant find a topic addressing this. 
 
My doubt is the following. Take a CD, convert it to FLAC, and convert the latter to MP3 (320kbps for the sake of this argument). Now, take the same CD, and convert it to MP3 (320 kbps). Is there any difference in quality between both Mp3 conversation? Is the flac process in the middle is going to downgrade the final Mp3 conversion?
 
Thank you. 

 

[Roly1650]

Good evening.
This question has been probably asked a gazillion times before, but I just cant find a topic addressing this. 

My doubt is the following. Take a CD, convert it to FLAC, and convert the latter to MP3 (320kbps for the sake of this argument). Now, take the same CD, and convert it to MP3 (320 kbps). Is there any difference in quality between both Mp3 conversation? Is the flac process in the middle is going to downgrade the final Mp3 conversion?

Thank you. 

No, for intents and purposes, the flac files are the cd files, when the flac files are decompressed, bit for bit identical.

 

[castleofargh]

what he said. ^_^
flac is called lossless because it is. when converting a 16/44 CD to 16/44 flac you have the exact same data. so it does not matter which one you pick to convert to mp3.

 

[aristos_achaion]

FLAC is a lossless codec, meaning that it will produce when decoded the exact same data it originally encoded. It's like a .zip file that's programmed to be especially good at compressing music...you'd no more lose quality encoding in FLAC than you'd expect to lose words from a document after it's been zipped and unzipped. The reason MP3 causes a loss in quality is that it's a lossy codec...i.e., a codec programmed to throw away some of the original data. Lossy codecs cause an irreversible loss in quality, but they make up for that by compressing much smaller than lossless codecs.

 

[headwhacker]

Good analogy is what winzip or similar tool does to an uncompress files/folders is what Flac does to your CD.