Apple ALAC vs FLAC, MP3, and WAV Audio Formats

Apple ALAC is basically Zip (Huffman) compression for Audio. It doesn't have the compression ratio that FLAC or MP3 does, and chances are that you can't hear the difference.

[DustinLaffertyTV]

If you cant tell the difference between lossless on an Ipod or MP3 or AAC then you have know room to discuss it.   Its like saying all whiskey taste the same if your drinking it out of the same glass..  Your ears must be trained to know what to listen for.  If your under 30 your ears are only are trained to hear compressed music. You also were raised in the middle of the loudness wars which was followed by compression trend (MP3).  If you can't tell the difference don't worry about it and enjoy, but those of us who don't like our music with mass amounts of noise artifacts and smeared transients or (90 percent of the music taken out) would prefer full resolution tracks or at least as close as we can get. AAC does a good job but there is a trade off you make between the heart and the head.  Long live 24bit 96khz  IMO  

[BrandonWirtz]

@Zsmart It's so very near lossless that it probably counts, the problem is in the implementation of almost every player out there. WAV is generally passed directly to hardware as a bit stream. FLAC is rendered to WAV data and played through the Audio Mixing Layer of the OS. As such the "default sampling rate" setting in your control panel is re-sampling the audio. As a result the play back is lossy even though the storage is loss less. (yes I should do a video on that.)

[skategeezer]

Bit input and output is clearly documented for lossless standards. I am an expert on lossless audio codecs and I am simply sharing my observations over time on multiple devices. I should also point out I am a musician so my hears may be a little more sensitive than most.

[Gabeisanerd]

You mentioned the amp, saying it wasn't good.
If you use an LOD and a external amp, you can't argue that.
I have a pair of studio headphones, with an LOD and an amp, and I hear a major difference.

[LimitIsIllusion]

The best file type of a song to listen to is the one that is playing while you are high. End of story.

[chrislebludgeon]

Very frank, but (as an audiophile) I like your response. I get so annoyed when someone tries to compare $200 Beats to $400-600 Seinheissers (I can't afford the $1500 ones).

[iraklynakashidze]

I am trying to save music in Loosless for a simple reason - to avoid hearing a compression. I have set of B&W speakers and Denon amp. So it's not the cheap boombox to listen music on. ANd when you are playing music from Mac, you can here sometimes digitalisation sound even on 320 Kbit/s. Probably, it has something to do with converter. So therefore I prefer not to compress heavily. I agree that it is almost impossible to see the difference in quality between loos less and 320, or even 256.

[BrandonWirtz]

@Joshorty In windows or mac os you can right click on the folder where your wav's are stored and choose "Enable file and folder compression" Poof they take up less space.

[mhuzwqz]

i got great speakers and i dont use special sound card but i can really hear the different flac just sound more clean and the bass is tighter

[BrandonWirtz]

Vorbis uses a model that adds artificial reverb at certain frequencies, and then deadends sound for compression efficiency after, the result is roughly the same as poking holes in your speaker and then playing it in your empty garage.

[peterfarr]

I pass double blind tests all the time on WAV vs mp3 (320 vs WAV) with 100% accuracy. I am a mastering engineer though and I always monitor on top of the line equipment. That said, I notice a HUGE difference between these formats. Mp3 is garbage IMO. Honestly data is so cheap nowadays why are we even talking about lossy formats? For $60 I can buy an external terabyte. a TERABYTE of data. That's insane! Who cares about shrinking down a WAV anymore? Flac or ALAC or useful for being able to include metadata, so that's preferable. It sounds a LOT better than lossy and data costs are so low lossy shouldn't even be considered nowadays.

[ja]

Hey blackwateropsdotcom, (this is based on my experience, becuase some people might say my mind put it there)) ive tested alac and flac and what i realise with alac is that its very clean, it doesnt have emphasis background noise like regular flac, which is what i like, another thing i realise is sometimes when i compare a flac and alac recording side by side, sometimes the instruments seem a little in the background/further away (thats for the alac) ( and they have the same replay gain).

[skategeezer]

Yes, this because FLAC supports more then two audio channels. ALAC is limited to two audio channels.

[amharris]

I agree with that; however, I disagree with your points within the video for not being able to hear the difference between decent bit-rate MP3s and lossless files.

Just as a test, I've ABX'd FLAC [a mix of 16|44.1/44.8s and 24|48/96] and 320kb/ps MP3s (through foobar, with the ABX plugin; as well as having others play the files for me) ...with AWFUL HD 201s. That was about twenty tracks, tested several times. 95% of the time, I could hear a reasonable difference.

[BrandonWirtz]

@10000asja MP3 Supports up to 640k. 512k is the highest standard that will work on all SPDIF/TOS Link devices. 384k is the highest that iPods used to support, don't know what the new high is.

[BrandonWirtz]

@Zsmart WAV is lossless so it sounds better. You may not be able to hear it, but as a rule lossless is better than lossy formats.

[amharris]

[CTD...]
...what makes it more - in some ways - amusing, is that the source was my motherboard's pathetic Realtek ALC889 chip.

...and with my HP-P1 DAC/amp. (with Senn. Amperior headphones and custom-sleeved TF10s - where IEMs do not synergise well with the HP-P1), there's even more of a difference.

What's interesting to me, is that I find that there's more of a jump between 320kb/ps CBR MP3s to waveforms/ALACs/FLACs, than 256kb/ps to 320kb/ps MP3s (CBR).

[BrandonWirtz]

@Joshorty Just enable Folder Compression you will get about the same level of compression and no loss.

[BrandonWirtz]

@Zsmart Flac doesn't give you much better compression than ZIP, so you would likely be happier with WAV files and enable Folder Compression, unless your Portable Audio Player Plays Flac, then you could get twice as many files on to it.

[XxXLostDkSoulXxX]

there is a chance for earbuds or IEM's shure has a line, westone has a line, jh audio has a line, etc, ..