Can FLACs ripped from CDs sound as good or better than the CD ?

What is your view on whether a FLAC ripped from a standard redbook CD and played on a good music server can sound as good as, or even better than, the actual CD played on a decent CD player. Assume music server and CD player are going into the same DAC. I have posted such a query on another forum and a consensus seems to be that there should be no difference, with a few folks claiming a CD player will always sound better. But if we argue no difference, why is that two different CD transports going into the same DAC can still sound different some times? While some argue that "it's all just 0s and 1s" it's not that simple is it? Jitter, EM interference etc? There's a YT video from the guy at PS Audio on this topic and he argues high end CD players sound better than music servers. But there are some really good audiophile music servers around now - the high end stuff from Innuos for example, like the Statement, sounds superb.

 

It's the same PCM data so it'll be the same.

If you're playing the CD through the CD player's DAC and the ripped file through a different DAC then these DACs are likely to sound different, that's because of hardware differences not because of the format.

 

One would expect them to be identical given both sources through the same DAC, but the only way to satisfy yourself is to try.

Given a quiet room and quiet music, I've found in the past that having the CD player in the same room when listening is a distraction due to mechanical noise from the player.

Not quite what you meant, but it was an issue for me, one that was partially responsible for my almost total switch to file-based replay as opposed to CD players.

The only discs I play physically are DVD, DVD-A and SACD, but if I get around to making satisfactory Hi-Res copies of them, then that may well cease.

 

I’d be interested in hearing an informed argument explaining why, apart from curiosity, this concern should be in the top 40 or 50 considerations anyone ought to spend time on while building and refining their music playback system, or even spend time on at all, ever. It seems like real “which sounds better, FLAC or AIFF or WAV or ALAC?” territory.

 

FLAC, WAV, AIFF and ALAC are all lossless containers of PCM data so it doesn't matter if you ripped the same CD to each of these different file types, it's the same PCM data. There'll be no sonic difference between them.

Sonic differences between file types is only a consideration for comparing lossy codecs like MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis etc. as each of these compression codecs discard source data to achieve a smaller file size and different lossy codecs achieve this in different ways.

 

It's certainly possible that a properly-ripped CD can sound better than the CD played on a CD player. Less jitter from the spinning of the disc, and less mechanical noise from the player (quieter listening environment). Also, unless you have a big space concern, I would rip to WAV over FLAC. I swear that playing back WAV files sounds better than FLAC files for some reason.

 

I'd say in this example, jitter is the most likely cause. Also, I can see how perhaps the digital input on a DAC (optical vs. coax vs. AES vs. USB) could also affect the sonics.

 

Same.

 

Not to be totally pedantic, but the slowest IDE drives you could buy from the mid-90's could easily transfer several megabytes per second. The digital stream coming off of an audio CD tops out at 150K per second. Even cheap modern spinning disks are capable of pushing over a hundred megabytes per second. The SATA bus used nowadays can handle 600MB per second, and the internal bus used to move data around the computer can push gigabytes per second.

In short, any modern PC will be able to play redbook CD audio (multiple streams, in fact) without coming close to saturating any internal or external bus used.

 

Whether to rip CDs to play back or play the CDs themselves is a pretty big time-use consideration, isn’t it? And wouldn’t the decision to do one or the other, or both, dictate which equipment to buy? Seems more important than top 40 or 50 to me...

 

We have however, seen instances where a Cd or a CD-R that won't play right, copied to a file on a hard drive, will play correctly. But, that's nowhere near what you're asking.

 

I dont know which one will sound better to you, but, I would suggest a few variables are the following:

• CD player/transport output port (transmitter) TOSLink -SPDIF
• Music server output port (transmitter) TOSLink -SPDIF- USB
• DAC input port (receiver) TOSLink -SPDIF- USB
• Music Server output file type WAV/FLAC/MP3
• DAC file decoder converter

Based on the dffierences between the transmitters and receivers, I would believe that SOME type of differences could occur. Not declaring that they do, but suggesting that they may.
Further, IIRC, some DAC's may be optimized for decoding one file type on the fly better than another file type (I recall the Squeezebox were supposedly better at playing streamed FLAC than streamed WAV, as the server was set to convert files to FLAC before sending them to DAC/receiver)

 

This is a topic covered years ago in The Absolute Sound in 2009.
Do Hard-Disk Drives Sound Better Than CD?
The conclusion even back then was that HDD offer no penalty over an optical disc. Harley went as far as to conclude that "hard-disk drives actually deliver better sound than optical disc."

He did a bunch of test to arrive at this. But I'll offer my own experiences in consideration. I've ripped ever optical music disc I own. For the CDs I used EAC to get bit perfect copies of the music. Most discs I own rip perfectly, but there are some that experience problems. EAC has to reread over and over to get the data out the disc. Sure there's a buffer in modern CD players. They read ahead of the music because the data can be read faster the can be played. But some discs I've read take well over a minute on EAC to reread the CD to get bit perfect duplication. I don't know the reason. A speck of dirt, maybe the disc isn't spinning perfectly, jitter or whatever. But it doesn't matter the cause. The fact is that it happens. And the buffer in a CD player isn't going to be large enough to handle a disc with these issues. So, when it happens, the CD player applies some kind of error correction and moves on. This isn't happening with data streamed off a ripped file. If the bits are perfect on a HDD, that's what gets sent through to the DAC and there isn't any error correction, because there aren't any errors. I won't conclude that a HDD sounds better, but, I will conclude that it won't sound worse.

 

Here's a little secret: uncompressed PCM sounds significantly better than FLAC.

 

Hi Stone Turntable. I can see your point, and I think I can help clarify the OPs question, because I have been dealing with the same issue for a while now, and I was just about to post the same question.

I used to have a very high end Linn CDP, and I sold it for fear of it quitting on me at some point. I have since acquired a very high end Naim Dac/Streamer, and I was hoping that ripping my CDs to a Synology NAS and playing them thru the Dac, would have my CDs sounding as good as they did thru my old Linn CDP.
So basically, does the ripping process provide as good a file transfer as the transport and laser reader on a high end CDP?
I'm hoping so.
So it's nothing to do with how one file type sounds compared to a different file type.

Dave

 

One concern for ripped CDs, if they happen to be affected: pre-emphasis. Without user intervention to address the issue, a computer typically won't apply de-emphasis, and the sound will end up being too bright.

 

Thanks for the heads-up. I'll look into de-emphasis. I definitely don't want bright.
My Dac is generally quite warm and smooth, but I would like to ensure that it's not too bright. (Like me!).

Dave

 

OP here - For what it's worth I posed this question to Hans Beekhuyzen on his excellent YT channel and his short response was that good quality music servers such as the Innuos Zen MK3, with good power supplies etc., sound very good indeed, and that a CD player would need to be top notch just to match the sound from the Innuos. I know some people don't agree with everything he puts out, but I for one think he knows what he's talking about. I'm intrigued to read above about WAV potentially sounding subjectively better than FLAC - I have heard a few folks claim that - but would those who claim this be able to show they can tell the difference in a blind listening test?! Maybe I will try it myself for fun. Thanks everyone for your intriguing contributions !

 

Have i been rickrolled?

 

Such comments without qualification are nonsense and meaningless.

 

Reality check using facts. Here goes with the help of xiph.org Foundation who invented FLAC for free distribution.

FLAC - Wikipedia

To keep it simple: Digital data stream in the form of PCM (standard CD) requires software format to decode it. From wiki: A simple container format for the stream, also called FLAC (or Native FLAC)

In comes the "container format": Container format (computing) - Wikipedia

In both of those wiki links show me anywhere it says it changes the sound of the data stream for good or bad.

Do you know what a "wrapper" does? It's just a format container. It needs an encoder and decoder. It doesn't know that the data makes sound. It could be a data stream for archiving someones saved data on their hard drive to a Zip file. Again the software algorithm doesn't know what it is so it doesn' know how to change it to make it better data when it is unwrapped to stream into your processor like a DAC or computer processor.

If you want to understand this more indepth then visit the people who invented FLAC...xiph.org

It is physically impossible to change the sound of digitally sampled waves because it is being run/streamed by a dumb machine and has to be told with an algorithm how to deal with it. Lots of moving parts and other fingers in the encoder and decoder algorithm pie to make your head spin on ever proving digital music can be affected by an algorithm. No one will be able to prove it with real evidence.

 

Let's throw SSD into the mix.

 

So if what you are alluding to is true, two different CD players, used only as transports, and fed into the same DAC, should produce exactly identical sound, right ? But many of us know that they don't. Similarly, two music servers serving up the same FLAC don't sound the same. Try a laptop playing a FLAC into a DAC and compare it to an Innuos Statement playing into the same DAC. Have you tried something like this? It's the same FLAC being fed into the DAC by two different transports. The same 0s and 1s yet it sounds different. My OP is not about whether FLAC is superior to PCM or the same, it is more a post about the impact of digital transports ultimately.

 

Which influences of the sound are you talking about? Influences of the PCM data held in a FLAC container or influences of it being a different DAC? You still have a lot of other influences unseen impossible to account for that would only have one chasing their tail trying to figure it out.

You'll never have any meaningful hard evidence to prove either way unless you are a computer scientist and electrical engineer and even that level of skill set would still take a lot of work to figure out what is going on.

 

"Jitter" is of little concern on playback. The audio frame is buffered by the CD player in multiple error-correctable steps, RAM that made initial players expensive. 14-to-8 bit RLL decoding, CIRC interleaving, etc



You can also complain about your web browser being able to crash and cause the audio playback to skip, or USB noise, or SPDIF transmission errors. We have to look at the facts of normal playback.

Where a "rip" can sound better than the actual CD is when the CD is degraded enough that both C1 and C2 errors occur at a rate that force the player to use interpolation recovery, or even muting. Persistent re-reads by a program like Exact Audio Copy can get error-free bit-accurate audio data where a standalone CD player would fail. (there are a few CDs that were released with bad mastering, along with more CDs that purposely introduce errors you can hear as "copy protection".)

Then again, you can buy and download FLAC, burn it to a CD, and that fixes the problem too.

A DAC never sees FLAC. It sees the digital audio bitstream provided by the layers above. The FLAC decoding is at the top, the "application" layer in networking. You can't put a FLAC file through an SPDIF cable or I2C channel.