[Skrying]

I recently ripped a few of my CD's to FLAC to get an idea to see if it'd be worth ripping the rest of my collection to FLAC. I discovered a few things about FLAC that are massive turn off's about it, and why I just will never use it.

My collection is entirely ripped at 320kbps MP3, to me this straddle's very close to the CD, not the same detail, but it retains the same sound, basically to me MP3 sounds just like the orginal CD's but just a slight touch of detail loss.

I figured I'd give FLAC a try, get some minor compression, but hopefully retail full detail of my CD's, what I didnt figure in was how much FLAC would ruin the "sound" of the music.

My first disk I tried was Opeth's Ghost Reveries, a very good recorded album, tons of detail, and represents what I listen to most of the time the best in a single album. After ripping to FLAC and played back in Foobar, I was VERY dissapointed.

What was wrong? The sound, there was no dynamics at all in the song. It seemed flat, like the song had been forced into a narrow beam and couldnt move up or down. Very boring sounding. Everything sounded like it was playing through a thin layer of cloth like material, just enough to muddle the sound a little bit. FLAC basically sounded like crap. Its only good thing was that it had indeed saved the detail.

Does anyone else have this experience with FLAC? I played back only through Foobar, no KS or ASIO, just the standard output. My rig is a X-Fi Xtreme Music and Ultrasone HFi 550.

What surprised me was that I think FLAC actually sounds MUCH worse than 320kbps MP3s. Very dissapointed.

 

[swmtnbiker]

Bizarre, since FLAC files are lossless and when uncompressed are *exact* copies of the CD tracks they're ripped from. FLAC is like ZIP or RAR that's designed specifically for audio data. The files are stored in compressed form, then are uncompressed to their original lossless form for playback. Compressing audio with MP3 actually throws data away to acheive smaller file sizes. I find it hard to believe that 320K MP3 sounds *better* than FLAC unless something is seriously amiss with your system.

On my system FLAC files are indistinguishable from the original CD audio. As for Foobar, I would definitely suggest using either ASIO or KS if possible to bypass the kmixer in Windows.

 

[johan851]

^ He's exactly right. FLAC files are a bit-perfect copy of the original data, just like .zip or .rar files. You literally don't lose anything at all.

Are you playing your CD from your computer's CDROM drive or from some other source?

 

[Veniogenesis]

Hmm, strange indeed. FLAC files are noticeably better than 320kbps files to my ears when I'm using my SA5K.

You said you've listened the Opeth's Ghost Reveries CD directly. What was the rig?

 

[blessingx]

There could be a problem with your FLAC uncompression/playback or you could perfer the lossy compression artifacts of your mp3s, but aside from those not sure the problem as (mentioned above) the info should be exact of original.

 

[Jasper994]

Try ripping to WAV and see if you still have the same complaint. If so, then you must like what the mp3 compression is doing to your music. If not, then I suppose you're either hearing things because you don't want to take up that much space on your hard drive, or you've done something seriously wrong (though I have no idea what you might have done to produce those results).

Like everyone else has mentioned, FLAC is identical to the original.

 

[johan851]

I'm wondering whether he's listening to a CD from a stand-alone player, and really isn't happy with his sound card's playback.

 

[viator122]

Wait, are you listening to the MP3s and the FLAC files using the same player program? Are you comparing them both using Foobar? The program you use for playback can affect the sound quality, from what I hear, with ASIO, kernel streaming and so on.

 

[Mikenet]

To make the MP3s in the first place, the CD would have been ripped. This ripped data is stored perfectly in FLAC, but is processed for MP3. So both started off with exactly the same source...

So either something is misconfigured, you like MP3 artifacts(which you shouldn't be hearing at 320k anyway, unless the MP3 encoder you're using is broken or misconfigured), or something else(maybe your ears are fatigued, getting a cold, etc).

I'd recommend a quick ABX test in foobar, if you can pass it, you will definitely know something is misconfigured(rules out the something else).

 

[Dihnekis]

FLAC sounds way better to me. Something has gone wrong somewhere.

 

[Cjattwood]

Yep, as everyone else here has said, check again and make sure you've done nothing wrong, because there's no logical explanation for it otherwise.

 

[jagorev]

It's just you.

 

[digitalcat]

Not trying to be a smartass, but make sure you're listening to them at the same volume.

 

[RichA]

I've just sat down for an hour trying various discs on both my optical drives. FLAC sounds exactly the same - but is much faster when it comes to going from track 2 to 8

.

--Rich

 

[Duggeh]

Perhaps you just like the sound colouration of MP3 files? Just as other people prefer the sound of LPs over CDs. Or the sound of one headphone over another. To each his own, if that is in fact the explanation, at least itll save you a bunch of hard drive space!