is PCM=FLAC ?

Just my initial listening impressions. Piano notes with pseudo reverberation seemed less wide and deep. That and the changes in treble quality were very slight.. a lot less noticeable than lossy compression artifacts. Sounds like the singer had moved a little closer to the microphone and had more spit in their mouth.

Any of the reasons already given in this thread could be causing it, all the way from imagination to errors in the decoding algorithm. I'd like to think that Foobar is working correctly, and that the bits from wav and flac playback of the same file are identical when sent to my d/a. That is my understanding, which is why I use it.

I'm intrigued that people with other playback software sometimes also claim to hear small differences.

 

Your FLAC audio files almost certainly started out as WAV when they were ripped from CD. So I don't get why you consider the 'a-b comparison' to be invalid.

Take a WAV file and compress it with FLAC. Then use F2K's ABX comparator to compare the original to the FLAC. I suspect you will find your identifications of 'X' are no better than random.

 

Oh, I get you now.

If you really think real-time decoding is the issue (even though it's fantastically unlikely to matter, unless your hardware or software are defective) then you could try this: make a F2k playlist of multiple copies of the same track in FLAC and WAV formats (16 copies would give you 16 'trials' for a blind identification test), give them distinct names, then shuffle play them. Without looking at the track name, see if you can identify which is FLAC and which is WAV by listening alone. You can use foobar's History function (a plugin you'd need to install) to tell afterwards how well you did.