Ok, so some are definitely going to say "This guy is looney tunes" but after 11 years of going back and forth I'm definitely convinced that FLAC and ALAC do not sound as good as WAV or AIFF. This all started when I gave up my CDs and player and went into USB DACs and Hi Rez downloads. For whatever reason, despite apparent superior DACs and better quality audio formats, something was wrong/just not as enjoyable as I remember my CD days being. Fast forward a decade, now using high end servers/streamers, I2S optical isolation, various power products, I started to realize the level of enjoyment and audio quality that I was looking for. Basically the solution had been to totally isolate the DAC from computer and get as much power noise isolation as possible.
But something still wasn't right. I subscribe to Qobuz, but found myself not using it that much because something about the sound was quite lackluster. In fact, I have compared FLAC files I downloaded from Qobuz with the exact same title streamed, and for whatever reason the stream was quite inferior. I've been told "It's FLAC, it's totally lossless, you are hearing things" My response, is that I really don't know what goes on in the Qobuz black box, but downloaded vs streamed FLAC sounded substantially different in favor of the downloaded file.
Where this journey ends is after endlessly tweaking my setup, still trying to get back the magic of my CD/SACD/DVD-A days, I started to remember first impressions I had when I started using FLAC and old comparisons I had done between uncompressed files vs FLAC and ALAC. I always heard FLAC being a bit more thin and less coherent, but knowing the actual data was the same I shrugged it off. Recently I went back and started doing listening tests, and lo and behold, AIFF was indeed superior to FLAC. In every case the FLAC was perceived as thinner, less present, having less width and depth, and less soundstage coherence. This was similar to my experience with lossless streaming, but much subtler. And yet, AIFF always sound and felt more full, present, and analog-like. Exactly what I was missing from my days playing discs, that last .1% that feels like completion and right-ness. I keep going back and my conviction only grows that any compression at all takes away something. Well this is inconvenient! I already have 2TB of FLAC music.
Considering that I already have total electrical isolation from my EMM Labs NS1 stream and DA2 DAC, and deep noise reduction from Shunyata Sigma NR cables and Denali V2, it's really hard for me to grasp what could actually be causing the differences in sound. I saw a study where the author claimed that it was album art, metadata, and and compression levels that correlated with changes in FLAC audio quality. Theoretically this would be creating noise in the playback, but I would expect that I have that pretty well handled with my setup. I'm looking to swap out my Shunyata NR cable to the NS1 with a V2 hoping to get just a little more noise reduction to the other components. I definitely don't want to try and modify the metadata on every FLAC and or do an AIFF conversion, and I'm not keen on downloading stuff all over again. But I just keep coming back to how natural uncompressed feels.
The esoteric fringe obviously, but has anybody figured out how to improve FLAC sound beyond what I have already done? I admit I have no explanations, but now I'm looking at replacing most of my music with AIFF, which is a big and expensive task. If it really was in my head I'd be more than happy to leave things as they are. If only there was some way to get the FLAC decoding to sound correct...
But something still wasn't right. I subscribe to Qobuz, but found myself not using it that much because something about the sound was quite lackluster. In fact, I have compared FLAC files I downloaded from Qobuz with the exact same title streamed, and for whatever reason the stream was quite inferior. I've been told "It's FLAC, it's totally lossless, you are hearing things" My response, is that I really don't know what goes on in the Qobuz black box, but downloaded vs streamed FLAC sounded substantially different in favor of the downloaded file.
Where this journey ends is after endlessly tweaking my setup, still trying to get back the magic of my CD/SACD/DVD-A days, I started to remember first impressions I had when I started using FLAC and old comparisons I had done between uncompressed files vs FLAC and ALAC. I always heard FLAC being a bit more thin and less coherent, but knowing the actual data was the same I shrugged it off. Recently I went back and started doing listening tests, and lo and behold, AIFF was indeed superior to FLAC. In every case the FLAC was perceived as thinner, less present, having less width and depth, and less soundstage coherence. This was similar to my experience with lossless streaming, but much subtler. And yet, AIFF always sound and felt more full, present, and analog-like. Exactly what I was missing from my days playing discs, that last .1% that feels like completion and right-ness. I keep going back and my conviction only grows that any compression at all takes away something. Well this is inconvenient! I already have 2TB of FLAC music.
Considering that I already have total electrical isolation from my EMM Labs NS1 stream and DA2 DAC, and deep noise reduction from Shunyata Sigma NR cables and Denali V2, it's really hard for me to grasp what could actually be causing the differences in sound. I saw a study where the author claimed that it was album art, metadata, and and compression levels that correlated with changes in FLAC audio quality. Theoretically this would be creating noise in the playback, but I would expect that I have that pretty well handled with my setup. I'm looking to swap out my Shunyata NR cable to the NS1 with a V2 hoping to get just a little more noise reduction to the other components. I definitely don't want to try and modify the metadata on every FLAC and or do an AIFF conversion, and I'm not keen on downloading stuff all over again. But I just keep coming back to how natural uncompressed feels.
The esoteric fringe obviously, but has anybody figured out how to improve FLAC sound beyond what I have already done? I admit I have no explanations, but now I'm looking at replacing most of my music with AIFF, which is a big and expensive task. If it really was in my head I'd be more than happy to leave things as they are. If only there was some way to get the FLAC decoding to sound correct...