Absolutely and more eloquently put than my post.
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I’m happy to discuss things I’ve observed here for the sake of sharing and interesting discussion and debate. My feathers only start to get ruffled when people start saying that I’m imagining something and that it is something that can’t possibly happen. Even when they haven’t tried it for themselves. I don’t mind someone saying that they’ve tried it and they don’t hear what I hear. That’s fine and I’ve no problem with that. But for someone to claim I’m imagining something simply because they are not aware of any mechanism that would make it possible is IMO just daft. Also people demanding, and I’m not using that word lightly, that I explain my observations in scientific terms in order for them to have any validity. Again, nothing short of daft. So what are they saying? If I can’t come up with a scientific explanation for what I hear then I must be imagining it? It’s like you telling me that you’ve seen a kangaroo in your garden this morning and me telling you that there are no kangaroos in the UK so unless you can prove it to me then my assumption is that you have been hallucinating. Clearly there is a more plausible explanation for your observation, but even leaving that aside, it would be very presumptious of me without knowing your medical history with regards to being prone to visual hallucinations.
My personal default position is that I simply beleive my ears. Which I suspect is the case with the majority of people. In one or two cases where I have observed something that I thought was particularly bizarre I have experimented further to verify my observations and to attempt to rationalise them. One such instance, and one that I recall attracted some pretty sarcastic and nasty comments from some members, was when had my Melco. I noticed that, despite no music data being fed through the router, only control data, it made a quite profound difference to the sound according to what the router was placed on. A little investigation and experimentation confirmed that the effect was real to my personal satisfaction, though I’m not claiming any scientific validity. Nor can I prove it to anyone. I have a hypothesis on it which is that the support surface affects the amount and type of noise being fed through the ethernet connection back to the Melco. It was a working hypothesis only and I had no way (or any great interest frankly) of verifying it. I could be wrong and it could have been for some other reason that I’m not aware of. But anyway it happened.
I’ve no problem at all with anyone wanting to investigate observed phenomena with their hi-fi to any degree they like. It’s not unreasonable for people to ask questions if I observe something unexplained or unusual. It is unreasonable I feel for people to conclude that I am imagining it without having very strong grounds to support this. That doesn’t mean it’s reasonable to conclude I’m imagining it just because either they or I can’t explain it. A reasonable and logical position to adopt would be that they remain unconvinced but open minded to the possibility of it happening and that experimentation on their part is warranted if they are interested in attempting to determine if it’s a real phenomenon or not. Sadly IME this rarely happens and the majority of people prefer to dismiss observations that they can’t explain as fantasy on the part of the observer. It’s counter productive and no doubt puts some people off from reporting some more bizarre observations for fear of ridicule.
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Yes, but with caveats.
Someone noticed that converting using dbPowerAmp from WAV to FLAC resulted in around 5% compression.
The answer from Spoon:
It is likely that pure silence is compressed even in uncompressed mode.
This will be part of LibFLAC which dbPowerAmp leverages.
FLAC is not designed to be fully uncompressed. The format exists to allow low cost decompression!
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Funny you should say that …
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Simon & Garfunkel fans could miss out then… 
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I’m going to bookmark this post. I’m very happy with my current system and I think honestly it’s about the balance I’ve achieved.
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@Marki , Dec 2022:
"You understood perfectly! What annoys me here is that I came on to show what I had found and what others are now perceiving to hear too including Melco who have a £1000 ripper that they see as important. I too was not sure it could be of importance. But I have been met with the assumption that I need psychiatric help 
and that my hearing is somewhat degraded so I must be wrong! I never asked for peoples opinion nor guidance I have been in this game for more than 40 years. It was my findings right or wrong, but somehow forums bring out the worst in people’s desire to tell you you must be wrong! Like listing to a Tory trying to tell you you need to make cuts to make ends meet while he is in his mansion! I don’t need advice or your opinion it was something I found! Kind Regards "
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Applause
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@Anon on dec 2019:
"Ok David has passed the originals on to me. I was very sceptical about this and wanted to try myself as to why this might be if it did exist and try and work out why, not just dismiss it outright. And listening to them on my headphone rig they are definitely different in presentation. It almost sounds like they are from different masters, the vocals stick out the most and are clearly different with one with more air around them the other flatter. Also the guitar twang after the chorus intro sounds dull on one comapred to the other. Now I have to take David at his word they are both from the same CD master but I would swear they are not if I was not told this.
At this stage I have no idea which rip is from which as I have not checked metadata or asked but they do sound different. All I have done so far is I added them to my ROCKS storage they showed up in roon and I have been listeinng and switching between them. The waveform in Roon looks the same, they are showing as the same duration and have the same volume levelling being applied, but they do sound different.
More to follow. This has thrown me I can be honest.#
I have absolutely no idea why I ended up with both WAV & FLAC as it was many years ago, sorry.
G
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With my Bluesound Node, there is a big difference. The Node does not like Wav metadata, and causes big problems with visualisation. It has no problems with FLAC. They say that Wav does not have a standard.
My Cocktail audio is fine with both, and even with my expensive headphone system, I am not aware of any sound quality differences.
I wonder how the dead hand of psychoacoustics, colours a lot of these arguments.
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I have 526 gigs of WAV on a HDD and 1.5 TB of FLAC on SSD and micro SD i can’t tell the difference
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Put both the Wav and Flac on the SSD and it will
be easier to hear the difference.
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once again a great post. What’s so ridiculous to me is that we all judge hifi by listening to it, so why do we need to change our approach when it comes to cables, file types etc.
The measurement argument is mindless because we aren’t engineers or designers. We would barely be scraping the tip of the iceberg with our measurements. Even so, if we take the example of an amplifier that has low distortion but very little gain. To the end user it will sound lifeless regardless of its low distortion figures. Having said that I’m encouraged by the replies on this thread. This community seems wiser and more educated in hifi as a hobby rather than a science experiment.
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Exactly. And because we aren’t (most of us anyway) experienced engineers who have been working in the field for years,and therefore understand what we’re doing, we wouldn’t necessarily even know what to measure or what’s important or how those measurements relate to the final sound heard. Obviously all the core scientific principles are known and can be found in established text books. This work is so specialised and of such limited application though that you won’t find it written about in any text book. The knowledge comes from research undertaken by engineers at specific companies and naturally they won’t be keen to share it for obvious reasons. This is another favourite thing pounced upon by those keen to dismiss observations as fantasy. “Tell me where the science behind this is written about in a text book”. You can’t, therefore you must be imagining it!
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My hypothesis is that the metadata , how embedded it is, can create a difference in sound, so explain why Melco rips sound better. The differences between the unitserve rips and Melco rips are in length and how the metadata is embedded.
A guy tested but removed the length differencia and the metadata, then found the exact same cd rips and same sound.
He could have then not removed them, but he did.
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Always transcoded all PCM formats to present to the NDS as WAV.
DSD are presented as DoP
Previously, it was Asset running on a RPi2 that was transcoding ‘play as WAV’, now it is SonoreUPnP Bridge from Roon.
The majority of my local library is FLAC or dsf, however this some ALAC from 20 years ago, when I started ripping CDs in iTunes to stream through a Gen1 Apple TV.
The majority of my listening is to local library, and at 8k albums, which 75% are HiRes (24-bit or SACD rips).
Have you read the oddly named English Premier or International (HiFi) - Cable Team Stats now available thread perchance?
Spot on. 
On another forum, in a post concerning cables, an experienced sound engineer explained the misconceptions and downright lies peddled by some unscrupulous companies selling snake oil Hi Fi products. I do not know the Engineering, but when the consequences of test results are explained it is easy to understand. There is a vast amount of information out there written by people with good credentials, that can save you a mountain of money.
A good place to start is by exploring the Harman Curve, and how it came to be. For example, it is pretty simple to learn how to read a Harman Curve, when buying headphones and understand if they are Bass heavy for example.