khaos974
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Mar 19, 2008
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Why? There is absolutely no audible difference between FLAC and WAV. Absolutely none. They contain the exact same data.
keanex wasn't exactly right when he said FLAC is a variable bitrate. It's not variable like MP3 can be. Case in point, if you play a variable MP3 in Foobar you can watch the bitrate change, but FLAC bitrate doesn't change. It compresses audio data much like a ZIP file. You can unzip a FLAC into a WAV at any time, and it will contain the exact same bits and exact same bitrate. Do you lose text file data when you place it in a ZIP? No, and you don't lose data when you place a WAV into a FLAC. There is no reason to use WAV if your players support FLAC.
The only conceivable "audible" difference is FLAC playback is harder on the CPU because it has to unzip it, which can cause extra jitter. The task is so trivial, even for tiny little DAPs like the Clip+, that a human will never, ever hear it. I believe it's actually easier on the CPU than lossy codecs are.
Actually, strictly speaking, FLAC is VBR like MP3, each the music is still hack into chunks before being compressed, and each chunks is compressed at a different level depending on the complexity of the music. While you only see the average bitrate while playing, it's indeed a VBR format.