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Comment by ptx | Hacker News Reader

Their recommendation doesn't make any sense. They first explain that lossless compression reproduces exactly the same data as when uncompressed:

"Lossless compression is benign in its effect on the music. It is akin to LHA or WinZip computer data crunchers in packing the data more efficiently on the disk, but the data you read out are the same as went in."

...but then recommend uncompressed over lossless compression for "serious listening":

"We recommend that, for serious listening, our readers use uncompressed audio file formats, such as WAV or AIF—or, if file size is an issue because of limited hard-drive space, use a lossless format such as FLAC or ALC."

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Yeah, that doesn't make any sense at all. The only reason I can think of to use WAV instead of a losslessly compressed FLAC is if the player being used has a dog slow CPU or an incredibly old software stack that can't play FLAC files.

But I doubt these guys are using a Pentium 1 machine to play their audio files so idk. The low end smartphone I had in 2013 could easily play FLAC files, at least in the real time uncompressing and decoding part of the equation. Now if the built in DAC and amplifier could take advantage of that extra data is another thing.

Funny thing is that even on a Pentium 1, it doesn't make much difference. You'd have to go to a 486 to really choose WAV. Even then FLAC is absolutely playable, it just takes a bit more than twice the CPU of WAV (70% vs 30%). MP3 though on the 486 is just too heavy to do.

There are two reasons to use WAV over FLAC in music production: you can load WAV files into your DAW faster; and WAV supports floating point, which means you never have to think about clipping until the final mastering step. Neither is relevant to listening.

FLAC has a massive advantage over WAV/AIF in that it can be tagged with metadata for the music player software to read and display.

Maybe decoding speed is an issue or decoder quality

The decoder either reproduces exactly the same bytes as the original or it's seriously broken. You can run "flac --verify file.wav" to test this, or compare the decoded bytes yourself if you don't trust the tool. I doubt such bugs are a common issue.

I suppose decoding speed could matter in some situations, but they said "for serious listening", not "if your system is so slow that it fails to decode the file in real time".

>I suppose decoding speed could matter in some situations, but they said "for serious listening", not "if your system is so slow that it fails to decode the file in real time".

Even decoding speed is doubtful, a 486-100 MHz can decode 44.1/16 FLAC in real time with CPU to spare.

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