Aiff Encoder Vs Apple Lossless

[Numeria Mealer]

Ionly have experience with .flac vs. wav, but Lossless files in general, don't sound as good as the original version when played "on the fly." Convert them back to their original format before playing, and through a resolving system they will sound a little better.The Absolute Sound 220 and 221 did quite a bit of research in the area of .flac vs. wav etc.. although the usual suspects refuse to accept what they reported, or most people report about subjective findings in general, and that includes differences between USB cables too.

"If you can't hear the difference between an original CD and a copy of your CD, you might as well give up your career as a tester. The difference between a reconstituted FLAC and full size WAV is much less than that, but it does exist."-Cookie Marenco. cookiemarenco.com/

How a Digital Audio file sounds, or a Digital Video file looks, is governed to a large extent by the Power Supply area. All that Identical Checksums gives is the possibility of REGENERATING the file to close to that of the original file.

I've never been able to detect a difference, and I can convert from alac to wav and aiff to wav and the two resulting wav files have the same md5sum, and I can convert between any two other lossless formats and then to wav and always recover the same md5sum. Thus the encoded information is identical. The only difference therefore would reside in the file container. A player like Audirvana removes the container before playback, so it should not matter what container the identical data is stored in.

A: AIFF format is not straighforward and we don't recommend using it. There are different formats for AIFF files - compressed and uncompressed - but the file-name extension alone won't allow you to differentiate them. Simaudio is currently working to make the MiND compatible with the AIFF file format that iTunes creates (AIFF-C/sowt). It will be available in a future MiND App update during Q1 in 2013. Converting files from AIFF to ALAC is good way to create a new "cleaner" format. Converting a lossless file from one format to another will be transparent and should not create any sound difference at all since the MiND streamer will output exactly the same PCM data to the DAC as you heard. MiND will not support any other type of AIFF file.

I ripped everything to AIFF, reasoning that, 1) memory is cheap - the need for compression is minimized, and lossless only saves you about 50% anyway; 2) converting a compressed file to a native bitstream has to involve more processing, hence more opportunities for error; and 3) increased processing must generate more electrical noise, which can't be a good thing. Its splitting hairs, admittedly, but those were my reasons.

Now I'm confused. Does anyone know if there really is any advantage of ALAC over AIFF other than file size? I believe Chris recommended ripping to a noncompressed form for playback, and a lossless compressed form for backup - although I believe he was using WAV and FLAC. Maybe I better rethink this before ripping the rest? I'm probably about a quarter of the way through a couple thousand CDs...

FWIW wav files are similar to aiff in that both are container formats, and can potentially contain something other than uncompressed PCM data. However I doubt you'll find many such files being offered as music downloads - figure it's more likely for them to be a result of someone clicking the wrong option in a conversion utility. Max, for example, is quite commonly recommended for file conversion, and it has an extensive / intimidating variety of encoder settings for both aiff and wav.

Anyway to get back to the point, it strikes me that Simaudio are making an elaborate excuse, but to be fair to them, they say they're working on an update. Call me a grumpy old cynic, but somehow I suspect the line about "AIFF format is not straightforward" will quietly disappear once the update is out

Converting a whole bunch of files from one lossless format to another is much quicker than re-ripping, and (given that you've been careful to check the conversion setup) carries no quality penalty no matter how many times you do it. So personally I don't see the need for you to change unless you're definitely going to buy the Simaudio (or some other streamer that has file format limitations).

I rip from CDs to AIFF with XLD into iTunes onto a 2Tb La Cie disk, and then I convert to Apple Lossless with XLD onto a 1Tb Toshiba portable USB drive. I have identical La Cie and Toshiba drives as backups and use rdiff-backup to keep the mirrored copies. I think disk space is cheap enough to make it worthwhile to maintain your collection in both AIFF and Apple Lossless. I prefer to buy downloaded music in FLAC format.

In my case if I was to compare the sound ALAC to AIFF, I would really be comparing the sound of a portable USB drive against a Firewire desktop drive more than the storage format I think. My collection will fit onto a 1Tb drive as ALAC, but not as AIFF. As far as I can tell nobody has said that Apple Lossless sounds better than AIFF - people either say they sound the same to them or they prefer AIFF.

Let me translate that answer from Moon for you - "We did not take the time to find out the facts and make our product work right, so we are blaming that on a well known and long used file format while we fix our product."

Given all that, I do what you do, I RIP to AIFF, and convert to any format I want to use on a particular system. JRMC at one time had problems with playing back ALAC files, so I tend to provide JRMC with an AIFF library. iTunes based libraries, even using Amarra and Audirvana, tend to work very well with ALAC, so I use that format for those libraries. FLAC works great for some systems, but I tend to avoid it if the system will use AIFF or ALAC, just because both AIFF and ALAC are cross platform compatible, Apple, Windows, and Linux, and FLAC is not really supported in iTunes based libraries.

When it comes to sound, sometimes I *think* I can hear a difference between ALAC and AIFF, or ALAC and WAV, or FLAC and AIFF, but it is never something I can reliably replicate. AIFF and ALAC sound essentially the same to me, so I interchange them as I wish without worrying about it. Indeed, I RIPped a few disks last night, and accidentially ripped then as ALAC. I will eventually get around to converting them to AIFF for the archive library, but it isn't high on my priority list of things "to do."

Back when I was stuck using a 1.5GHz G4 Mac mini w/1GB RAM and Leopard, it was very easy to tell the difference between AIFF rips and Apple Lossless, but only if you listened to one version then the other. Soundstage was flatter, female voices did not have the same air, emotion, or reality, and my friend used to comment how all the ALAC files in our library had a "sameness" to their presentation. We even demonstrated this to a few select people in our (Hovland Co.) room at CES '08. I know I did the comparison--using a female vocal--for John Atkinson, Robert Harley, and if I recall correctly, CA's own Chris Connaker.

So last year, when I finally got a new Mac mini (2010 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo w/8GB RAM, slimmed Mountain Lion, A+, etc.), I did the comparison again. Well, darn, as much as I hate to admit it (I went into it biased to hear a difference) I now can NOT tell any appreciable difference between an AIFF track and the same one converted to ALAC.

Again, I am sensitive to tiny differences in my system (lifting the 5V off the USB cable at the computer end, or even smaller, quitting Finder), so I was pretty surprised, given what we consistently heard back when our computers were under-powered and under-RAMed.

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