I think your own experiences are what you have to go by. If you can’t percieve any difference between FLAC and WAV then so be it. I could point out to you that if you can’t trust your ears then how do you know that there isn’t a real difference and that you just don’t hear it? But I’ll resist that temptation…
As far as the brain telling us what we want to believe well I’ve never found that to be the case personally. Maybe you have though. I recall when I listened to a much more expensive Melco music server than the one I already had. I was very much hoping for it to sound no better, or only slightly better than my existing Melco. That way would save me £5K which I couldn’t sensibly afford to spend. Unfortunately, and totally against my wishes, it sounded far superior. I just had to have it.
Yes. Totally agree here. When you get it just right the music comes alive and the impression of reality is greatly enhanced.
It is worth remembering that whether or not there actually is a difference in sound (as opposed to people possibly perceiving a difference when there isn’t or not hearing a difference when there is) will depend on the specific renderer, with it entirely likely that with some there will be no difference while others may indeed be affected by the processing.
Not really… it’s quite a well trodden path.. which ever facet you are looking at. It was one of my favourite modules as an Electronics and Computer engineering under graduate.. it fell under closed system modelling and systems theory (this addresses ‘errors’ to the signal through distortion and noise etc) … though some of the maths got interesting… also an interesting part I had to manage in my final year project.
There is also entropy and information science which is very well understood, and the modern IT world is.. as well as EM physics and its engineering design considerations.
And then there is psycho acoustic and subconscious (expectation and confirmation) bias part… that I have worked with more in my professional life. The AES has interesting studies and scientific and engineering publications from industry and universities from around the world on these matters specifically with audio.. often revealing interesting outcomes.
Alas there is no magic here.. it’s pretty much all deterministic .. it’s a case of knowing what to measure and what and how to affect… but don’t underestimate the human observer… or in this case listener.
As I say FLAC is often used in mastering as a data transit format… but that’s not to say a particular consumer piece of equipment or hifi doesn’t sound better having concpverted it to a different transit format, such as one of the WAV formats.
Not to stir the part, but about 15 years it was not uncommon to hear differences (yes very subtle) between WAV file type encodings. Some might not realise there are at least two WAV file formats, extended, and basic canonical… as well as choosing the PCM endian format. Because I have set my system up to be transparent to lossy encoding types I don’t notice this now… but I suspect those out there that hear differences between FLAC and other encodings such AIFF might notice this.
As far as introduction (at an engineering level) books go, in terms of design and noise and distortion mitigation in many of its guises it’s hard to beat Horowitz and Hill’s Art of Electronics. .. the electronics and computer hardware designer bible in my opinion.. that through its editions has been the cornerstone for many electronics engineers. I still refer to my now very well well thumbed older edition… it’s that useful.
Someone with a gen1 naim device can say, pretty definitely, that there is a SQ impact of WAV vs FLAC. It’s quite well accepted on the older devices. We heard this ourselves on NAC272.
There has been lots of detail on how naim designed the gen2 devices to mitigate this sort of thing. But people are using them differently. Some use NDX2, some use NDX2 with PSU, some use NDX2 as transport only.
It’s not really possible to compare those three use cases for WAV vs FLAC, as the streamer is “different”. And it goes without saying that there are myriad possibilities of preamp, power amp, speakers and cabling around those streamers.
So each to their own. If someone sleeps better listening to WAV, who are we to argue.
That doesn’t, however, mean I am not interested in investigation into a “better sounding” rip….better to understand.
What I should perhaps have said was that the information isn’t readily accessible in a form that will be easily understood by lay people and can easily be translated into something suitable for presentational purposes here that will make sense to people. Bear in mind that you are something of a special case being specifically qualified in this field so it’s all in a days work for you. Even most of us that do have scientific backgrounds are likely qualified in other unrelated areas and many here have no scientific training at all. So you can appreciate the difficulty.
Still I stand by what I said. I’m reluctant to mention cables again, having already received a ticking off for this, but as far as my comment goes about the work being so specialised that you won’t find it written about in any text book I would think that’s true in some cases. I’m thinking of the work that companies like The Chord Company have done on cable insulation and shielding for example, in developing their products. Obvioiusly the underlying scientific principles are well documented, but I wouldn’t have thought that there were any text books or even references in text books to the specific effects and their causes of different cable insulation types on music signals. It’s too specialised and of such limited application that there would be no call for it. Maybe in specialist scientific or trade journals perhaps, but I don’t know.
Well there would at least be any/all people on the forum who are interested in understanding things. Then there will be similar people in the hi-fi community outside this forum. I would have thought it would also be of interest to genuine hi-fi manufacturers (as opposed to snake oil peddlers), and just possibly some sectors of the pro Audio industry. If definitive information is posted only in this forum, there is still a strong chance these days it would be picked up in Internet searches, especially by AI, and that might bring people to read it on the forum open (and maybe find out a little bit about Naim while at it!). PhD research papers have been published which may have less wide interest than this!
who might pick something up from the forum via Internet searches, then come here and read (and maybe discover more about in while edit!)
There would be interest here for sure and in the wider hi-fi community. But text books are academic works not aimed at lay people and assume a certain knowledge on the part of the reader so I imagine such a work would have very limited appeal in reality. So limited that to publish it commercially would make little sense. Of course self publication is a possibility and a number of such works do exist, though not in this field. (as far as I’m aware anyway). There’s also the point that original research undertaken by engineers at hi-fi companies (or any other company) would almost certainly be subject to legal protection by the company making any dissemination of this information impossible.
This is one of the prime difficulties faced in developing a deeper understanding of this stuff, for those that are interested in doing so. The information just isn’t accessible. Even I would guess to most employees of the company. It comes under the remit of industrial secrets. If you’ve developed a cable insulation techique that sounds vastly superior then you really don’t want the details of how it was achieved to be talked about on a hi-fi forum! Unless you are happy to sacrifice all commercial advantage in the name of science that is.
I’ve tried talking to some of the folk at The Chord Company about their Ground and Power Arays and they quite quickly become very cagey and obviously uncomfortable discussing them in any sort of detail. Which is perfectly understandable and fair enough.
Though whether they cagey because it is an invention they haven’t patented, or whether, as with some things in the hi-fi world, it is simply snake oil, or whether it is just something very simple that they don’t want to admit to (which I suppose you might call industrial secret) is just a matter of conjecture! To my mind this is all the more reason to test and measure and analyse these things so that those who wish to can understand.
On a properly configured digital playback system, WAV and FLAC sound identical because they decode to the exact same PCM audio data. There is no inherent sonic advantage to WAV. Some listeners report WAV sounding “airier,” “more open,” or “more relaxed.” Technically, this is not because the WAV file contains better audio — it doesn’t. FLAC reconstructs the exact same bits during playback
Well I can verify from personal experience that these products do what it says on the tin. That’s just my experience though, and it has no scientific validity. For all I know these products may contain sugar crystals or they may contain a genie locked inside them waiting to get out! In fact Chord do emphasise that they must not be opened as it may “compromise your safety”.
To measure and analyse would be informative certainly. It puts me very much in mind of when I was a physics undergraduate and in our electronics module we were presented with a number of sealed boxes with input and output terminals. The idea was to determine what was inside them by feeding various currents/voltages/waveforms into them and analysing the output via various measuring equipment, oscilloscopes etc. Great fun.
Identical PCM audio data does not equal identical sound. This is like saying that all CD transports sound identical provided that they output digital streams containing identical audio data. They don’t, as listening to them will very quickly confirm.
I honestly thought we’d got past this misconception a long time ago. It’s like going round in circles. This thread is perhaps heading towards dangerous territory now so I’ll bow out here. I don’t want to be around if/when it gets pulled as I’ll inevitably get the blame for it.
I think what DJ Fox is saying is that the two formats will provide the same measured sound output with the same components, thus they will sound equal.
I agree, back in the days of Naim 1st generation streamers and the variations of beta firmware we went thru, we all agreed WAV had a slightly better SQ.
This remember in all cases is the streamer doing what all streamers do with lossless LPMC files is processing the FLAC, WAV or whatever into raw PMC
Now after the development stage is long past and having tried and demo’s to friends playing my Synology NAS with Asset set to stream the FLAC files as FLAC or transcoding to WAV, the WAV is marginally better.
However doing the same comparison with ND555 and NDX2, I (we) can’t detect any difference.
