[youurayy]

(Can't post into the Computer Audio forum yet. / Sorry if this is a repost.)
 
Stumbled upon a new article comparing WAV and FLAC in practical use and drawing some interesting conclusions:
 
http://www.enjoythemusic.com/magazine/viewpoint/0716/Why_Do_WAV_And_FLAC_Files_Sound_Different.htm
 
My general understanding is that -- at the expense of extra storage / transfer space, extra album / track metadata and lack of transfer error protection, WAV eliminates some potential problems that may arise due to the extra encode/decode steps in FLAC -- not on the spec paper, but in practical / actual use. The article, if true, provides more significant reasons.

 

[VNandor]

If you read the article carefully, you'll notice that they made a null test to check if the FLAC and WAV files could null each other and they indeed could, which means that they carry the EXACT digital information. Null testing is a much more reliable form of testing than blind-testing can ever get. So wherever the difference comes from (if any, because they used a rather "strange" testing protocol to say at least) it can't be the FLAC encoding.
Actually there was a discussion going on about this article in our sound science sub-forum somewhere but the discussion ended after several people could produce the nulls (what a surprise).

 

[jodgey4]

"So, at this point, what can be concluded from these results? We can say with some confidence that the metadata-associated cover art is primarily responsible for the decline in height reproduction and associated sound quality when WAV and FLAC files are interconverted. Without a large enough memory allocation in the playback software, this loss of replay sound quality is observed in both FLAC and WAV files. Whatever this property of the metadata might be, remarkably it is transferable from FLAC to WAV and back again to WAV, and with increasing negative effect with the number of conversions. Moreover, this particular file property cannot be detected as a change in file size or by conventional null testing procedures, yet it can be readily detected by ear and may be quantified by observed changes in vertical height reproduction."
 
Sounds like a software problem, not a FLAC one necessarily. Interesting findings, I suppose, though I'll want to dig through the article and white paper again.

 

[cel4145]

These guys are idiots. They already tried to put this idea forward before with another research project that they did. There's no reason to put any stock in it.