Converting Flac Files To wave files

[Nightcleaner]

I read Hi Fi Magazines a lot But read them standing up in a newsagent stores or Supermarket. Was in Hi Fi News I Read a journalist had converted Flac files to Wave Files With surprising result. He Thought the sound quality improved somewhat.

Have you given it a go. What was your conclusion for the benefit of AK readers if you agree. why do you think this might be so.

 

[vwestlife]

Not having that article on hand... did they do a blind A/B comparison, in which they could repeatedly correctly identify which sample was WAV and which was FLAC? If not, then it could simply be the placebo effect.

 

[KeninDC]

Perhaps the DAC used has a "better" algorithm for reading and converting WAV than it does for FLAC even though, in theory, there should be no difference.

 

[E-Stat]

He Thought the sound quality improved somewhat... why do you think this might be so.

Understand there is real time processing involved to de-compress a FLAC stream on the fly. Depending upon the power and load of the computer handling that task, there might be sonic compromises.

I don't face that challenge with the streamers I use. Both use quad-core, 64 bit ARM processors that are dedicated to this single task. Consequently, they run no more than around 5% utilization. Which today is not a expensive task using the popular Raspberry Pi platform. I use one in the garage system attached via WiFi. Even streaming high resolution content, I experience no buffering either in part because I configured 600 MB of its memory as an output buffer. It operates effectively as a memory player.

When I previously used a lesser powered Squeezebox Touch, I configured the LMS server component (an i7-860 based unit) to perform the decompression and send the WAV file to the device.

 

[Nightcleaner]

Some good stuff and thanks everybody, to digest. Maybe i should break a habit of a lifetime and buy a magazine instead of reading it standing up. I will get in there again this week and Finnish of the article.

 

[Yamaki]

The only real concern I have is WAV file conversion doesn't always bring the metadata (track name, track #, artist, album, date, album art, etc...) fully through.

 

[JoeESP9]

The metadata issue is the major reason I don't use wav files. Of course, there's also the file size thing. However, with storage so inexpensive that's not really an issue.

 

[dahoo]

Perhaps the DAC used has a "better" algorithm for reading and converting WAV than it does for FLAC even though, in theory, there should be no difference.

DAC doesn't do that. FLAC, WAV will be decoded by CPU into PCM and fed to DAC. so DAC is looking at the same thing.