[scannon18]

Here is a hypothetical situation:
 
Johnathan illegally downloads an album from his favorite artist.  He appreciates high quality music, and so he downloads a FLAC version.  His friend happens to own the very same album as a CD and brings it over to Johnathan's house later that day.  Now, supposing Johnathan was running both albums through his computer (via hard drive reading or optical drive), a portable amp/dac, and very nice headphones, could he expect to hear a difference in sound quality between the two versions?
 
How high of sound quality is a CD capable of? Is it worth it to buy the album?
 
note: please hold all opinions on illegally downloading copyrighted material. I do not support it, I do not practice it.

 

[basementdweller]

I thought FLAC was essentially a zipped wav file which gets uncompressed during playback, so; the quality should theoretically be the same if running through the exact same source.

 

[flaming_june]

Depends how it was ripped.  Some flac don't sound as good as 320 mp3 or CD

 

[budgetboy]

Its the same, 99.9% of the time. With torrents, theres always a small chance that the uploader didn't do a good rip, but people who upload FLAC torrents usually use EAC and make perfect rips. I have a large collection of FLAC collected in this way and I've never questioned whether it was truly lossless or not. "Jonathan" can go ahead and start downloading lossless music now.
 
Edit: I can abx FLAC and V0 if I know the song well. By never questioned, I don't mean that I've just assumed it was lossless, just that I haven't heard anything in the tracks that would suggest a re-encoded mp3 or a bad rip. But yeah the only things that would make it inferior in SQ to the CD would be a bad rip or if it was an mp3 encoded to FLAC instead of the WAV from the CD. If your ripping to FLAC, your going to make sure you have a good rip. And re-encoding mp3s would just be mean. Basically, FLAC is lossless, FLAC cd rips are almost always good, so FLAC rips, regardless of the source, are almost always identical copies of the CD.

 

[Landis]

Hmm... Technically it's plausible that one could take a 56kbps MP3 burn it into a music CD and then rip FLAC files off it.
 
The key is to support your favorite artists by buying their CDs or authorized digital copies so you know your music is how that performer wanted you to hear it.

 

[budgetboy]

When you buy music, most of your money is going towards the record label. I say get your music however you want, and support your artists by going to shows and sharing them with other people.

 

[plonter]

a lot of "fake" flac files are spreaded in the internet.  not necessarily on purpose but somtimes because the lack of knowledge of those who spread those files.  they don't know that they can't turn mp3 to flac/wav.   I am sure there are ways to confirm if the file was flossless from the start but i am not exactly sure about them..and it maybe impossible if the file was a 320kbs mp3 originally to notice the difference.
"jonathan" will be advised to buy the cd's himself and rip them.  this way he can never go wrong and also it is much more fun to listen to the music afterwards.    I can only speak for myself,but everytime i listen to music in my mp3 player ripped to flac,i feel that this is a great luxary to have those original cd-ripped-files in the palm of my hand.  
 
anyway..i think that we shouldn't continue this discussion because it is against the forum rules (unless it's ok in the sound science forum?).

 

[lazybum]

I think there is a foobar plugin to check if your flac file is really lossless
Go google foocdtect

 

[googleborg]

load the flac waveform up and see if there's an obvious cut-off shelf in the high frequencies, an mp3 will have a clear shelf but untouched should have high peaks all over the place.  Also, you can still hear the difference between flac and mp3 on things like crashy cymbals/timpani, quite easily, should you A-B them quickly, but on the whole it's not easy, mp3 is much better at preserving music than it used to be - remember when the high frequencies sounded like listening to the sea down a long tube

 

[jcx]

extract flac to .wav and compare:  http://www.libinst.com/Audio%20DiffMaker.htm

 

[krmathis]

You may or may not, mostly depending on the quality of the ripping done for the downloaded set.
As you have no control over that one.

 

[scannon18]

So, if I gather this correctly:  assuming there is a perfect rip from .wav to FLAC, it will sound exactly like the CD?  Really, this was half a question on the flac dl and half a question on the sound quality of CDs.  I see a lot of people saying that CD sound quality today is essentially perfect, compared even to vinyl.

 

[silverxxx]

If all things equal there should be no difference. It will decode as the same bits, so it should be identical. The flac decodes to an identical wav, you could burn it to a cd and get the identical grooves in it.

 

[m00k0w]

It should be exact, especially if the FLAC is done correctly and it is ensured the drive was not bumped during reading. Even if it sounds correct, the data may be off somewhere, corrected incorrectly with some error checking protocol (not sure how common it is for the wrong data to be deemed the correct fit for an error). Assuming you are using the exact same program to play the files, it should be the same.
 
Maybe someone could clear up one thing; some older drives have this 4-pin audio cable along with the IDE and power. Does this carry digital or analog data? I've never myself seen a necessity for this and it may be a really archaic thing for music.
 
Also, playing the CD itself may have inherent problems like skipping which may or may not be corrected or audible. Again concerning the quality of the FLAC rip I would hope the original person would use a perfectly clean CD with a high quality and properly installed (stabilized) drive.

 

[silverxxx]

Quote:

 
Maybe someone could clear up one thing; some older drives have this 4-pin audio cable along with the IDE and power. Does this carry digital or analog data? I've never myself seen a necessity for this and it may be a really archaic thing for music.
 

The 4 pin carries audio, line level. If there is similar looking 2 pin plug that would be a digital output. It is from the days when computers did not have the speed to play data, well, not if you wanted to use it for something else in the same time. And yes there is a dac in there, somewhere.