On Thu, 05 Jun 2014 15:53:24 -0500, Richard Kimber
wrote:

On Mon, 02 Jun 2014 23:35:43 +0100, Glenn Richards wrote:

A well-known hi-fi magazine recently ran an article about how apparently
an uncompressed WAV file sounds better than FLAC.

Ummmm...

*facepalm*

I was puzzled by this too, so I listened to a file in both formats, using
sox to produce a wav from the flac.

Initially, the wav did sound a little better - until I realised that the
volume of the wav was slightly louder. Once I'd compensated by putting
up the volume a notch on my Quad pre-amp when I played the flac, I
couldn't tell any difference.

- Richard.

Assuming you can playout the flac to a wav file, you can compare the
original wav file against the flac encoded one using an audio
processing utility such as audacity or CoolEdit Pro by lining them up
exactly, normalising and then subtract one from the other. If flac
fails to losslessly do its magic, you'll hear something as opposed to
the expected dead silence.

IOW, it should be easy enough to verify the "Bollicks Factor" in that
article. :-)
--
J B Good