Regarding wifi sound degradation, the usual hypothesis is, as far as I am aware, that running the wifi within the streamer causes additional load in the streamer. IF this is a problem, it would as far as I can tell be easily solved by running an external wifi receiver and cabling it to the streamer. This would at least guarantee that there’s no electrical noise influence coming from the router or the internet
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Let’s say, as a simple, conceptual example, that there are 5 seconds of silence. In a wav file with CD quality, this is represented as actually storing 16 bits of zeros for 5 secs * 44,100 times. (This results in the same file size as when storing 5 seconds of music that is not just zeros in each sample but, say, 1011000100110001 etc)
FLAC achieves the compression by just writing down “5 seconds of zero”. But this is not music data that you can send to a DAC.
So, the FLAC needs to be decompressed, and the FLAC decompressor sees “5 seconds of zero”, so it turns that back into 5 seconds * 44,100 samples of 16 bits of zeros, and this is what is sent to the DAC
Yes. I meant technical explanation that would explain why a FLAC would sound better than the WAV that it was created from.
Plus, to be precise, I can’t think of any such technical explanation. Well, if the decompression happens within the streamer, the increased noise caused by the increased processing work might be experienced as more preferable sound, I suppose this is possible. But if the decompression does not happen within the streamer but externally, I cannot think of any explanation at all
I believe more that there may be other factors involved, but no one really knows.
As I said, I preferred WAV on my ex Unitserve. Now Flac with the Melco.
But mostly I prefer AIFF.
I am not alone, have read here , on old threads, that a few prefer FLAC, and also that some don’t hear differences. I am still referring to old streamers. Most say they prefer WAV, but there may some bias inducing, because it’s often stated that Naim recommends WAV.
Maybe @Simon-in-Suffolk will confirm. Because I know they are compressed, but however lossless. I know also that a lot configure their Servers to convert on the fly from Flac to Wav.
But I have never read that the decompression from FLAC to WAV IS AUTOMATIC.
I still think that the decompression is not automatic. But I may be proven wrong.
Yes, lossless. Of course. If I send you a text file that consists of 100 pages of the letter X, 1000 times per page, you can throw away my letter and just write down “100 pages, 1000 times X each page”, which obviously takes less space.
Then, if you later create a new text file with 100 pages of 1000 times X, this is lossless. If you use the same text encoding, such as ASCII, there is no difference between the two files.
And yes, the FLAC must be decompressed into music data before sending to the DAC. That’s just how it works, sorry. Either the UPnP server does it by configuring it to transcode the FLAC to WAV before sending the WAV to the streamer, or otherwise the streamer has to do it before sending the data samples to the DAC. This is precisely what was proposed as an explanation for why the transcoding to WAV by the Upnp server might be beneficial, because then the streamer does not have to do it, which lowers its processing load. This is not completely implausible if the streamer does not have much computing power, like the legacy Naim streamers. But now you seem to be saying the opposite, that using the FLAC sounds better to you
I mostly download bought albums in AIFF. AIFF takes even more space vs WAV, but I prefer AIFF.
Wav sound a bit flat. Flac more airy. AIFF fuller vs Flac, but not flat.
I know, there’s no logic. But I repeated the comparison on different days, different moods, with my Melco settled on Flac and on Wav.