[flac-dev] uncompressed FLAC

[Declan Kelly]

On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 09:50:20AM -0800, giles at thaumas.net wrote:

> I wouldn't worry about it though. It's unfortunate the dbPowerAmp
> developers want to take advantage of the subset of customer who don't
> understand what 'lossless' means.

I read some of the articles on www.audiostream.com earlier, and some of
those linked from it. I can't understand the "uncompressed is better
than lossless" notion either. At least with CD playback, a CD-R copy is
going to be more prone to jitter (and added gaps from poorly configured
rip/burn software) which does affect the sound, but comparing FLAC and
WAV on exactly the same hardware should yield no difference in audio.

On systems where the I/O is the bottleneck (for example, a smartphone
app or hardware player with slow storage) there can be a higher risk
of buffer underruns with uncompressed source material. And with a low
powered CPU, there should be more of a risk of underruns with tighter
compression ratios. This could explain why some audiophiles have heard
better results with looser FLAC compression on the same device. But on
modern (and reasonably powered) hardware, there should be no practical
difference at all.

-- 
-Dec.
---
"Mosaic is going to be on every computer in the world." - Marc Andreessen, 1994