[tomb]

 

   
FLAC compresses white space, not anything with data.  Print a page out on a printer and look how much white space is there compared to the text - even a full page of text.  The analogy is valid. 

There is at least one major hole in your analogy. There are no white spaces in a music file.. It is all 0 or 1.
To get an idea of where errors are bound to crop up in FLAC: a 16 bit WAV file has quite a few compromises in it after conversion from 24 bit (as used at the studio end for editing etc.) Indeterminate boundary bits consisting of alternative 0s and 1s in a WAV file are easily interpreted as a string of just 1s or 0s after conversion to FLAC. Much is made of the FLAC checksum before and after compression. But in reality, it should be the WAV file checksum that should be compared against the compressed FLAC checksum. If those two match, you can then have a better certainty that no bits were lost during the making of that FLAC file.

No, a digital file has 0's or 1's - but you don't know what it is until those 0's and 1's are converted.  It might not even be music or even audio, period.
 
As for music, it has dead space all around.  If the music was totally compressed with all frequencies having an amplitude not equal to zero, that's the only way it wouldn't have white space.  The digital sampling is setup for 20-20KHz.  Every frequency per time that's not producing sound is white space.

 

[paaj]

It has been compared many times. Take a WAV, make a copy, convert to FLAC, convert back to WAV, compare two WAVs. They are the same, and there are tools that actually compare bit for bit.

If you try to compare the WAV checksum vs FLAC checksum they will be different as they are not the same files: FLAC is smaller. Compare a text file checksum to it's zipped brother and the checksums will be different while the content is the same. Nobody doubts ZIP...

I can't think of a compromise in 44/16 compared to 192/24 other than dynamic range and frequency extension. All information you would expect is there, which is not the case with MP3.

 

[elmoe]

Yes, FLAC is equal in quality to a WAV file, as said above it is literally like a ZIP file.
 

The encoding of audio (PCM) data incurs no loss of information, and the decoded audio is bit-for-bit identical to what went into the encoder. Each frame contains a 16-bit CRC of the frame data for detecting transmission errors. The integrity of the audio data is further insured by storing an MD5 signature of the original unencoded audio data in the file header, which can be compared against later during decoding or testing.

 
thus "lossless".

 

[cdvsmp3]

Here is a nice and handy spectrum analyser (http://spek.cc), for those of you who are interested.
 

 
By the way, I am conducting a survey on CD vs AAC 256: http://goo.gl/Xin6xt and http://goo.gl/Dfawrb (two different approaches)
Please try one of them (or both)

 

[The Walrus]

I've always used MP3 320 because I did not hear any difference. But now, with my Ultrasone Pro 2900 headphone, I noticed that cymbals are much brighter and that I can hear some nuances in losseless format. Then I found this:
 

"Crash Cymbals

The main role of a crash cymbal (most drummers actually use multiple crashes of various sizes and sound) is to serve as a musical punctuation point. The name “crash” cymbal is very accurate in describing the sound. Loud, brash, dense, and awfully overbearing at times, crash cymbals have the widest frequency range of all cymbals mentioned above. A typical crash can be any where from 400-500 Hz (or lower) all the way up to 10k-12k Hz for sheen, followed by frequencies that are beyond 20k Hz. All points in between. That’s a good rule to remember when it comes to crash cymbals. You might have a tiny china crash that sounds off at 5k Hz and resonates into the 25k or above territory. In contrast, you can also have a big obnoxious crash that booms at 300 Hz and just dominates the low midrange, yet manages to get up to the 10-12k Hz sheen range."

What I want to ask is, can resonance from instruments cause such a difference audible to the ear with the right equipment to differentiate between lossy and losseless formats? 

Another question (the answer is probably yes but...): I have ripped all my CD's in losseless WMA format, but my DAP can play only FLAC, so I convert the WMA to FLAC. Can it make a difference compared to FLAC files directly ripped from CD?

cheers,