Wav to Flac conversion

Roughly 2000 albums being converted from WAV to FLAC, and remember, this is being done on an elderly HDX, bless it. :relaxed:

Hope its on a zimmer fraim to speed things up😁

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So almost 2.5 times the size of mine, good luck :rofl:

I have no personal experience to go on but it does occur to me to wonder whether the extra processing load in transcoding from FLAC to WAV before serving the file to the DAC has the potential for a slight degrading of sound??

I used to wonder the same thing, so previously resisted converting the files to FLAC.

However, recent events with network related problems made me realise that my NAS, full of Naim rips in WAV, wasn’t really a meaningful backup at all.

I did convert a handful of albums, before taking the plunge, and have listened to them, transcoded back to WAV, and I can’t hear any difference from the original files.

Others may well explain the technical side of why you may be correct, but my ageing ears were unable to discern any difference, which works for me.

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The hard work is the initial transcoding to FLAC (as Dave is now discovering!) and even the less powerful older generation Naim servers have no trouble transcoding back to WAV on playback. Besides, the streamer just sees WAV and has no way of knowing when the last transcoding process took place, so you wouldn’t expect to hear a difference.
Speculatively, if you were using the HDX local playback rather than serving files over a network, any extra noise generated by transcoding ‘on the fly’ might possibly affect sound quality.

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