CD Ripping: Sound Quality Comparisons Between File Playback & Optical Disc Playback

[sefischer1]

How about .aif files?

 

[NorthStar]

Sorry to disappoint you, but WAV presented the best soundstage and imaging. The FLAC files also added a slight sibilance to vocals with 'S' words. That's when I realized that if FLAC playback was messing that up, it was probably messing other stuff up as well. It was an easy decision for me to Rip all my stuff to WAV. I don't give a flip about Meta Data... I listen to music!

I am not disappointed by what you've just said. Those are your ears we're talking about, and it is extremely hard to be disappointed when ears hear the way they do for each person sporting them and processing them. It's a very personal thing, our ears.

 

[asiufy]

AIFF is similar to WAV, different wrapper for the raw PCM data.
That's what I use for my rips.

 

[Empirical Audio]

Steve, which one is best, FLAC or WAV?
Let me guess which is the better quality...FLAC ?

WAV is the best of all the formats, including FLAC, uncompressed FLAC, AIFF, and ALAC.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

 

[Empirical Audio]

Steve N. seems to prefer to optimize his digital systems by reducing the jitter going into the DAC as much as possible and then using a non-reclocking DAC. Others (most?) seem to have addressed the jitter "problem" over the years by developing/adopting reclocking DACs to get rid of as much jitter as possible which may have accumulated in the signal path, with the attack on jitter occurring right before the digital to analog conversion so as to avoid possible jitter injected by downstream cables, connectors, or electronics. While jitter may once have been a significant problem, according to testers such as Archimago (here) and John Atkinson (here) neither the Oppo UDP-205 nor the Benchmark DAC3 I'm using have significant problems rejecting jitter. Benchmark's own published jitter immunity results show its DAC3 to be quite immune to upstream jitter. See Graphs 15 and 16 on pages 61 and 62 of the manual here.

IME, "others" have insufficiently addressed the problem. That IS the problem. IF they could actually achieve really low levels of jitter with their reclocking, that would be great. Unfortunately, that is not the world we live in.....

Maybe when I retire from this I will write a book on methods to minimize jitter.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

 

[Empirical Audio]

How about .aif files?

Nothing is as good as WAV, sorry.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

 

[NorthStar]

WAV is the best of all the formats, including FLAC, uncompressed FLAC, AIFF, and ALAC.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Thanks Steve, I trust your ears above them all. They are close to the brain.

 

[sefischer1]

My .aif query was meant as a trolling joke, to get a whole bunch of angst riddled ear ringing going. Have fun all!

 

[tmallin]

Further listening has convinced me that compared to CD playback from my Oppo UDP-205 through the Benchmark DAC3 HGC, the uncompressed FLAC files on the USB stick inserted into the Oppo's USB slots are not as good sounding. Less depth of field, less certainty of image placement, less instrumental detail, a bit of screech on strings, a bit of dynamic compression, and a general feeling of less natural and relaxed presentation which leads to boring listening.

Given Steve N's proclamation of WAV as the best sounding files, I re-ripped a couple of CDs to WAV and compared those to the CDs. The WAV files sound excellent when played back from the same USB stick on which the FLAC files sound second best. The WAV files sound fully the equal of the CD playback.

Now, do I need to re-rip to WAV, or can I just convert all the FLAC files to WAV and have the same excellent sound?

 

[3rdRock]

Now, do I need to re-rip to WAV, or can I just convert all the FLAC files to WAV and have the same excellent sound?

You need to start over and Rip them directly to WAV files!

 

[analogsa]

You need to start over and Rip them directly to WAV files!

Ha, ha. Seriously?

 

[microstrip]

Further listening has convinced me that compared to CD playback from my Oppo UDP-205 through the Benchmark DAC3 HGC, the uncompressed FLAC files on the USB stick inserted into the Oppo's USB slots are not as good sounding. Less depth of field, less certainty of image placement, less instrumental detail, a bit of screech on strings, a bit of dynamic compression, and a general feeling of less natural and relaxed presentation which leads to boring listening.

Given Steve N's proclamation of WAV as the best sounding files, I re-ripped a couple of CDs to WAV and compared those to the CDs. The WAV files sound excellent when played back from the same USB stick on which the FLAC files sound second best. The WAV files sound fully the equal of the CD playback.

Now, do I need to re-rip to WAV, or can I just convert all the FLAC files to WAV and have the same excellent sound?

This test is only relevant to USB sticks being played in the Oppo. Most probably the Oppo reacts poorly to the extra processing work of decoding the FLAC files. But it is not meaningful for a proper server.

If you convert an existing bit exact FLAC to a WAV you will get the same file as if you rip form CD to WAV.

 

[Empirical Audio]

Further listening has convinced me that compared to CD playback from my Oppo UDP-205 through the Benchmark DAC3 HGC, the uncompressed FLAC files on the USB stick inserted into the Oppo's USB slots are not as good sounding. Less depth of field, less certainty of image placement, less instrumental detail, a bit of screech on strings, a bit of dynamic compression, and a general feeling of less natural and relaxed presentation which leads to boring listening.

Given Steve N's proclamation of WAV as the best sounding files, I re-ripped a couple of CDs to WAV and compared those to the CDs. The WAV files sound excellent when played back from the same USB stick on which the FLAC files sound second best. The WAV files sound fully the equal of the CD playback.

Now, do I need to re-rip to WAV, or can I just convert all the FLAC files to WAV and have the same excellent sound?

I have not had any issues converting FLAC back to wav. I have compared it to the wav file ripped and it's identical, at least with XLD and dbpoweramp.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

 

[cjfrbw]

I listen to some of my CDs compressed to FLAC on a USB chip connected to Yamaha Pre/Pro and I think they sound better than the CDs played on disc player routed through the same Pre/Pro. I don't know why this is, and don't really puzzle about it, but it seems to work very well.

 

[christoph]

Further listening has convinced me that compared to CD playback from my Oppo UDP-205 through the Benchmark DAC3 HGC, the uncompressed FLAC files on the USB stick inserted into the Oppo's USB slots are not as good sounding. Less depth of field, less certainty of image placement, less instrumental detail, a bit of screech on strings, a bit of dynamic compression, and a general feeling of less natural and relaxed presentation which leads to boring listening.

Given Steve N's proclamation of WAV as the best sounding files, I re-ripped a couple of CDs to WAV and compared those to the CDs. The WAV files sound excellent when played back from the same USB stick on which the FLAC files sound second best. The WAV files sound fully the equal of the CD playback.

Now, do I need to re-rip to WAV, or can I just convert all the FLAC files to WAV and have the same excellent sound?

The culprit is NOT the format (FLAC) but the obvioiusly poorly implemented USB section of the Oppo.

 

[analogsa]

Little wonder that the extra processing required for real time flac decoding generates correlated jitter and noise and is audible. There is however one example which is more baffling. JRiver has offered a memory playback for several generations. Flacs and other compressed formats are decoded to a PCM code and loaded into RAM prior to play time in exactly the same manner as a WAV. Unfortunately the programmers likely oversaw some issues as slight perceived differences remain, but nothing like what older players present.

 

[NorthStar]

The culprit is NOT the format (FLAC) but the obvioiusly poorly implemented USB section of the Oppo.

But its USB input (DAC) is the best measuring one among a multitude of other USB DACs.
You can easily verify that online. Ok, it is an inexpensive player (205) @ only $1,300 when Oppo Digital was still in business. Now the 205 is around twice on eBay.
Those USB input measurements best all the rest.

 

[NorthStar]

"The Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) is the most popular lossless format, making it a good choice if you want to store your music in lossless. Unlike WAV and AIFF, it's been compressed, so it takes up a lot less space. However, it's still a lossless format, which means the audio quality is still the same as the original source, so it's much better for listening than WAV and AIFF. It's also free and open source, which is handy if you're into that sort of thing.

The WAV file is one of the simplest and oldest digital Hi-Res audio formats. It was originally developed by Microsoft and IBM in 1991. I'm not going to go deep into history, but, in a nutshell, Apple later derived its own version of WAV, and they called it AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format). Basically, AIFFs are Apple's equivalents to WAV files. These audio formats work by taking audio signals and converting them to binary data.

Actually both of these audio formats have their advantages and disadvantages. I prefer using FLAC. Because it has the original quality, even after compression. If you want to convert WAV to FLAC or convert FLAC to WAV, you can use a video converter tool."

- Owen Smith (Quora)

 

[tmallin]

During the holiday season I took some time off work and during that time completed re-ripping my entire CD library to WAV files. As before, I went straight from the CDs ripped by my Dell DVD player to the Patriot Rage 2 512 GB portable USB drives. But this time, instead of the UNCOMPRESSED FLAC format I used last time (many use compressed but lossless FLAC encoding--dBpoweramp recommends level 5 compression, for example), I ripped the CDs to uncompressed WAV format via dBpoweramp.

I'm aware that some said that I could safely convert the FLAC files to WAV files and still get the better sonics I hear from WAV when played via my Oppo UDB-205's USB ports. I may try that someday--I kept the FLAC encoded files on their USB sticks and back ups and bought new sticks for the WAV-encoded files. But to make sure I got the kind of sound I heard in my preliminary WAV/FLAC file sound comparison, I decided to invest the many hours in ripping to WAV directly from the CDs.

This way I was also able to improve considerably on the custom file naming scheme I was using before. Now I'm satisfied that I can actually find particular music performances more easily from the file names than from what is written on the spine of the CD jewel box on the shelf. Being able to easily find what you own is, of course, one goal of ripping CDs to files in the first place.

And the results are sonically wonderful! The sound from the WAV files on the USB sticks played via the Oppo's USB ports is actually better than the sound of the original CDs played in the Oppo's drawer. In contrast, the FLAC file playback via USB stick was definitely a bit or more inferior to the CD playback sound.

The words "relaxed naturalness" come to mind. As good as CDs sound played in the Oppo's drawer, playing the WAV files offers yet more of this quality while not sounding inferior in any way.

Compared to the CD playback, I believe the WAV files also have a blacker background, more audible detail in the music and the recording environment, deeper and more expansive staging, but with no frequency response anomalies which could cause a false sense of added detail.

Who knows whether my sonic comparisons are system specific or not? I tried to keep things simple and control as many variables as I could.

No, I did not use a "proper server," whatever that is. That was the point: I sought to avoid interjecting as many variables as I could. My goal was to use the same playback unit (Oppo UDP-205), same DAC (Benchmark DAC3 HGC), with no extra or different electronics, cables, or wireless links in either signal path from source (the CD or file) through speakers.

Obviously, the signal path inside the Oppo is going to be somewhat different for files read from the USB stick versus a spinning disc. But a "proper server" reading files, transmitting them through a network and then to a DAC obviously will have more differences in the signal path than in my experiment.

 

[Kingsrule]

Is there a way to batch convert flac files to wave?