What have I done? And why?

[Rearwing]

Having had a B2 for four years I did something strange yesterday. My 2gb metallic B2 has been my office machine for all of its life and given that I sometimes use it in the background rather than for critical listening I have always been happy to let it convert to flac to save space.

Yesterday however, I formatted the disc and started from scratch!

I am in the early stages of semi-retirement and I have been spending more time on collecting and collating my music collection; and as a result of this I decided somewhat rashly to re-load my B2 with only my favourite music. I also made the decision to use the no compression setting, which will decrease space, but should increase quality.

My main system is reasonably but sensibly high end and I have a large number of hi-res/DSD/BLU-RAY albums that sound fantastic through a Chord DAC and power amp set up, and I am hoping to get as close to that quality by just using my B2, a Violectric DAC and the rest of my office set up.

The majority of my favourite music is covered between the Average White Band to ZZ Top, with occasional side steps from Aaron Copeland to Wagner.

Very occasionally I swerve towards modern music, with current favourites including Carson McHone, Teddy Thompson and (sadly) the late Justin Townes Earle.

I have really enjoyed my B2 to date and my bedside B1, and I hope that as I take a slightly different direction, it will continue to entertain and delight.

Thank you for reading, please add a comment on my set up, my recent changes, or my musical taste.

[JAC]

FLAC is a lossless compression format, i.e. once decompressed for playback you end up with exactly the same bitstream as the original WAV file.  Its only downside is the time taken to compress.

MP3 is lossy, and the information thrown away can never be recovered.  No good for serious listening.

[Rearwing]

H JAC, I have only had FLAC files previously, but with more time on my hands going forwards I will be keen to hear if there is any difference with native WAV. Pretentiously, I have never used mp3 as a format for music.

[Daniel Taylor]

On Monday, September 21, 2020 at 8:21:02 AM UTC-4, Rearwing wrote:

I also made the decision to use the no compression setting, which will decrease space, but should increase quality.

Keeping your tracks as WAV instead of FLAC will definitely NOT increase quality.  As JAC has already mentioned, there is no loss of data when converting to FLAC.  FLAC stands for Free Lossless Audio Codec, the key word being Lossless, meaning no loss of data and no loss of quality.  OTOH, MP3 is a lossy format where data is actually discarded, which can have a negative impact on sound quality.

Since you mentioned that you have some of your music in other, higher resolution formats, I will mention that any hi-res music files copied to the B2 will be down-converted to 16 bit 44.1 kHz sample rate when being played.  Also, not all hi-res formats survive the down-conversion, and some even become unlistenable.

[Rearwing]

Hi Daniel, thank you for your reply. I don’t copy hi-res files to the B2, it was never purchased as hifi, but rather as an alternative to the radio in my office, so for that reason it has only ever been red book CD’s that have been loaded.

As for FLAC being truly lossless it is an interesting rabbit hole to explore! FLAC is encoded in a number of different formats, if you go into the preferences of dbpoweramp you can select the encoding rate; so there maybe differences in dynamics depending upon rates and playback kit. 

At the end of the day though, what interests me is the music and not the machine.

[Mark Fishman]

> FLAC is encoded in a number of different formats, if you go into the preferences of dbpoweramp you can select the encoding rate

I think there's some vagueness in the use of words here that might be confusing you. FLAC is a single format. It's not a "container" format, like OGG, or WMP. What you are calling "encoding rate" is probably referring to the *speed* at which the encoding is performed: faster encoding processes do not have the time to make the file as small as slower encoding processes. That's all the number in the encode line means: 6 will make a smaller file than 5, and therefore takes longer to compute.

But no matter what number you choose, you get a file that can be 100% restored to exactly the bits that were in the original WAV. That's because FLAC is lossless:  it doesn't lose anything.

It is like the ZIP format for text files: there are several ways to encode the text to produce smaller files in the ZIP format, and all of them can EXACTLY reconstruct the original text file. It is LOSSLESS.

I hope that's clear. -- m.

[Daniel Taylor]

Thanks Mark.  That's the first time I've seen the different FLAC "levels" explained.

[PMB]

Hi Mark,

Thanks for the explanation of what FLAC levels mean.

Paul

Brennan Support.