[Don_S]

A friend recently brought over a USB stick with FLAC files of Rolling Stones reissues to play on my system. They sounded dreadful.  Like MP3 on steroids. 

I have my music stored in .wav files and they sound great. I want to download some hires music but I have a slow internet connection so I was looking at download options that might be faster.

How does FLAC stand up against .wav?  Was the poor quality I heard from the flash drive the result of FLAC, my music player, or did the reissue recordings suck all by themselves? One of the recordings was High Tide and Green Grass.  I realize that is an oldy-moldy and may just be a horrid reissue.

[groovybassist]

I personally find wav files sound better in my system.  Why, I don't know - they just do.  If the FLAC files were encoded with a lot of compression, that may be part of the cause.

[firedog]

FLAC and WAV should sound identical- the flac file is "lossless" compression and uncompressed before playback. Yes, some people claim they sound different; I haven't seen any non sighted listening test that backs this up. My audiophile friends and I sometimes think they sound slightly different, but  we can't consistently tell one from the other in non-sighted listening, so apparently they don't.

dbpoweramp will encode wav or re-encode any flac into "flac uncompressed" which gives you no compression in a flac "file package".

The advantage: you get the use of full tagging (as in flac) without compression.

[ted_b]

As firedog says, FLAC was not the issue, the original recordings were.  There is nothing saying that those FLAC files weren't simply compressed bad MP3 or other poor copies (FLAC can be converted from anything, not just great sounding wav or other lossless files...it's just a container).  Think of FLAC as like a zip file.  If the zip files contains pictures, and they are poor copies of copies of copies, then just because they are zip files doesn't mean they will look good once unzipped.

FLAC is best used when you know the original is the original (wav from ripped cd, from download, or other lossless format like AIFF or Apple lossless) and then you convert to FLAC to simply save addtl space.  When a FLAC-capable player plays FLAC it first uncompresses it then plays it.  FLAC is not the problem here.

[Big Red Machine]

Ah Ted, always straight answers.  I typically rip my CD's directly to FLAC, so there should be no advantage to wav then, correct?  And then there is the tagging advantage with FLAC files.

As firedog says, FLAC was not the issue, the original recordings were.  There is nothing saying that those FLAC files weren't simply compressed bad MP3 or other poor copies (FLAC can be converted from anything, not just great sounding wav or other lossless files...it's just a container).  Think of FLAC as like a zip file.  If the zip files contains pictures, and they are poor copies of copies of copies, then just because they are zip files doesn't mean they will look good once unzipped.

FLAC is best used when you know the original is the original (wav from ripped cd, from download, or other lossless format like AIFF or Apple lossless) and then you convert to FLAC to simply save addtl space.  When a FLAC-capable player plays FLAC it first uncompresses it then plays it.  FLAC is not the problem here.

[JEaton]

How does FLAC stand up against .wav?  Was the poor quality I heard from the flash drive the result of FLAC, my music player, or did the reissue recordings suck all by themselves?

Doesn't take much to try it out. Install FLAC, which takes juste a minute and requires no configuration. Run FLAC Frontend, take some music that you're familiar with, drop the WAV files into the user interface, set the output folder and press a button to encode the files in FLAC. Then listen.

[ted_b]

Ah Ted, always straight answers.  I typically rip my CD's directly to FLAC, so there should be no advantage to wav then, correct?  And then there is the tagging advantage with FLAC files.

Pete,
I specifically stayed away from FLAC vs wav on sonics.    But if you must know.... My feeling is that wav sounds slightly better if a/b'd with gnat hair resolution, but is a PITA cuz metadata/tags are poorly if at all supported; most players don't support any tags in wav...itunes wav tag support is locked within iTunes (meaning if you move your wav files from itunes the tags stay behind).  FLAC tagging is universally supported (for those players that accept FLAC, that is).  So what I do is rip to FLAC, use MP3tag to do full FLAC tagging, convert to wav (and save FLAC file for archiving) and make sure my wav files names include "track number-artist-album-track_name" so if wav tags are minimal in the player I'm using I can still find the damn song, and still know the album is in the right order (since track number is the first part of the file name).