[Daedalus Audio]

hi, this is probably a dumb one but what is the difference between AIFF and WAV? 

thanks,
Lou

[Rashiki]

They are both formats for storing audio data, usually uncompressed. AIFF is the standard usually used by Macs and WAV is the standard usually used by WIndows-based systems. They are both tagged formats, meaning that some additional data can be included (artist, title, etc.), but most applications will only read the audio data.

 -Rob

[JEaton]

Both store uncompressed PCM, but AIFF uses big-endian byte storage, while WAV is little-endian (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness).  AIFF has native support for metadata tagging, while the WAV standard has none, although IDv2 tags are sometimes used in WAV.

[Rashiki]

Actually, AIFF files created on Macs are usually a variant that use little-endian encoding.

And WAV does support embedding of text tags with artist and title information, although it isn't widely supported.

[Hoots]

Do you think WAV sounds better than FLAC or other lossless compressed files (both ripped with EAC)?

[Rashiki]

Do you think WAV sounds better than FLAC or other lossless compressed files (both ripped with EAC)?

I don't hear a difference, so I converted all of my WAV files to FLAC.

Some people say they do hear a difference. Under ideal situations there should be no difference, but decoding FLAC does consume more CPU than simply reading the WAV file, so there could be some small timing differences introduced. Depending on your output devices (e.g. SqueezeBox, USB DAC, USB to S/PDIF converter, etc.) these timing issues may result in jitter.

Of course, if your system is I/O bound rather than CPU bound, the smaller size of FLAC files may actually help with preventing the timing issues.

So, it's impossible to give you an absolute answer. There should be no difference, but depending on your system FLAC may sound better or worse than WAV. The only way to find out for certain is to try.

 -Rob

[NewBuyer]

Rob said it well.  In my wired system I do hear a difference between FLAC and WAV, but I cannot explain it as they should be exactly identical when the FLAC is decompressed.  Since there is no bandwidth limitation or other reason for me to use FLAC or other compressed formats, I just continue to use WAV .iso/.cue files with very nice results.