Sound quality comparison

[simoncn]

(24-08-2014 16:36)tarnkappe Wrote:  I, too, think that it depends on the client hardware if it makes a difference to play wav or flac. Theoretically there should be no difference as the result is bit/byte identical. But on my naim uniti 1 the wav format does sound better. I have checked this together with my 13 year old son, and not only his younger ears found that the uncompressed format sound smoother somehow. The difference is not very big, but even in blind tests we heared correctly with most of the tracks we did check.

IMHO the only reason for this can be that the uniti has less to compute with wav. The flac format needs to be uncompressed and maybe this results in more electronic noisfe maybe because of less interrupts and jitters or something. As I have read the difference should be smaller with the new uniti 2, because it has a faster CPU or DSP.

Maybe you can find hardware that works better with flac or at least does not make a difference at all.

I thought the original question was whether it sounds better to play a file ripped as WAV or a file transcoded to WAV. I have not heard any difference between these.

The discussion seems to have moved on to whether it sounds better to play a FLAC file without transcoding or with WAV transcoding. With my renderer (a Linn DS), it sounds better with WAV transcoding and better still with WAV24 transcoding.