In article , Richard
Kimber scribeth thus
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.



Log onto this page for the Wolfson audio card for the Raspberry Pi PC
and theres a section marked download HD audio around 550 M/bytes.


These tracks are FLAC encoded, what do you think of them?..



http://www.element14.com/community/c.../raspberry-pi-
accessories/wolfson_pi?ICID=rpispace-wolfson-sideban
--
Tony Sayer

On Thu, 05 Jun 2014 22:52:44 +0100, tony sayer wrote:

Log onto this page for the Wolfson audio card for the Raspberry Pi PC
and theres a section marked download HD audio around 550 M/bytes.


These tracks are FLAC encoded, what do you think of them?..



http://www.element14.com/community/c.../raspberry-pi-
accessories/wolfson_pi?ICID=rpispace-wolfson-sideban

Unless I've been looking at the wrong files, I think most of these are
binaural, aren't they?

- Richard.

In article , Richard
Kimber scribeth thus
On Thu, 05 Jun 2014 22:52:44 +0100, tony sayer wrote:

Log onto this page for the Wolfson audio card for the Raspberry Pi PC
and theres a section marked download HD audio around 550 M/bytes.


These tracks are FLAC encoded, what do you think of them?..



http://www.element14.com/community/c.../raspberry-pi-
accessories/wolfson_pi?ICID=rpispace-wolfson-sideban

Unless I've been looking at the wrong files, I think most of these are
binaural, aren't they?

- Richard.

Yes they are!..

Do sound good on headphones...
--
Tony Sayer

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

In article , 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.

What's curious about that is that sox should convert with no changes in the
values when 'reconstituted' back into LPCM. So either you'd added a scaling
or the player was up to something akin to the problem I reported.

Did you just use something as simple as

sox in.wav out.flac

to do the conversion?

And what playing software did you use?

Jim

--
Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me.
Electronics http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm
Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html
Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html

On Fri, 06 Jun 2014 12:11:02 +0100, Jim Lesurf wrote:

What's curious about that is that sox should convert with no changes in
the values when 'reconstituted' back into LPCM. So either you'd added a
scaling or the player was up to something akin to the problem I
reported.

Did you just use something as simple as

sox in.wav out.flac

to do the conversion?

It was quite a long time ago (when I first saw reference to this in HFN),
but as far as I can remember, yes that's what I did.

And what playing software did you use?

I streamed the files to a Pioneer N-50 using minidlna using a wired
connection.

- Richard.

In article , Richard
Kimber
wrote:
On Fri, 06 Jun 2014 12:11:02 +0100, Jim Lesurf wrote:

What's curious about that is that sox should convert with no changes
in the values when 'reconstituted' back into LPCM. So either you'd
added a scaling or the player was up to something akin to the problem
I reported.

Did you just use something as simple as

sox in.wav out.flac

to do the conversion?

It was quite a long time ago (when I first saw reference to this in
HFN), but as far as I can remember, yes that's what I did.

And what playing software did you use?

I streamed the files to a Pioneer N-50 using minidlna using a wired
connection.

I don't have any experience with 'streamers' of that kind. I just play or
record on the basis that the player or recorder read or write the file.
Given that I *assume* the flac file is read by the N-50 and that's what
turns it into LPCM or whatever to output the eventual analogue signals. On
that basis it looks like the N-50 is scaling flac and wave differently.

This may be quite understandable as the device doing the conversion may
simply scale values in some way for some reason - e.g. shy of clipping
during the format conversion processing - which then means the outcome
differs from the LPCM that the flac file data represented. As I guess
you'll know, *correctly done*, wave - flac - should give a result
identical to the original. Alas, 'should' may not mean 'does' in all cases
with real devices, programs, etc. :-/

So it does look like an example of where a setup might cause an 'innocent'
reviewer would say "wave is better than flac" as a general conclusion
rather than "slightly louder sounded better" because they didn't check.

I've also lost count of reviewers saying 'DSD sounds better than LPCM' even
for the same source, and when many ADCs and DACs may use low bit
(essentially DSD) anyway. Such confusions between container and contained
are rife, alas. No help to the poor readers.

Jim


Jim

--
Please use the address on the audiomisc page if you wish to email me.
Electronics http://www.st-and.ac.uk/~www_pa/Scot...o/electron.htm
Armstrong Audio http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/Armstrong/armstrong.html
Audio Misc http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/index.html

On Fri, 06 Jun 2014 15:06:06 +0100, Jim Lesurf wrote:

I don't have any experience with 'streamers' of that kind. I just play
or record on the basis that the player or recorder read or write the
file. Given that I *assume* the flac file is read by the N-50 and that's
what turns it into LPCM or whatever to output the eventual analogue
signals. On that basis it looks like the N-50 is scaling flac and wave
differently.

Well, you could be right about that. FWIW, I have to set *very*
different volume levels when I'm playing internet radio via the N-50
compared to streaming from the hard disk via minidlna.

On a completely different matter, I note that you put streamers in
quotes. I've always thought that using a dlna server was 'streaming' and
that doing anything else was 'playing'. Am I right that there's been a
takeover of the term 'streaming' by the wider community that does not use
dlna? IMHO Software players 'play'. But, then, nowadays, nothing seems
to matter :-)

- Richard.