Does lossless sound different?

ALAC and FLAC are two lossless audio formats. Do they sound different than uncompressed audio in WAV and AIFF?
Have you gotten your copy of the Audiophile's Guide to setup? Make magic with your system using this guide and CD.

[janinapalmer]

I'd dearly love to see the graphic noise levels for that SACD transport WITH or WITHOUT the galvanic isolation ...

[BrianSu]

This is the most perfect answer I’ve come across. I’m amazed at how Paul in his age still gets all the acronyms and technical details spot on!!!

[selfelements]

I absolutely loooove these kind of questions!

[fightsong]

People should pay less attention on the format and more on the mastering.

[oscarbenson]

Seriously taken blind tests with professional musicians and audio journalists have shown that there is no statistical discernment between higher resolution mp3s and cds. Good recording, good mastering, good streamer, good dac and good other electronics (and cables 😉 ) does the job. I forgot to mention good room and good speaker placement.

[keithsowerby]

John Swenson made the point about processing noise or load affecting sound quality on Audiostream about 10 years ago. Very important to reiterate that digital decoding is not a process that happens in isolation as if by magic.

[ChristosPeltekis]

Recording and Mixing tenths or hundreds of channels in a daw with processing plugging effects while almost maxing out my cpu is ok. The moment my music hits your dac there is some heavy lifting to be done and all hell brakes loose!

[Antoon]

If audio devices get better in isolating noise is there still a function for power plants?

[imkow]

i also heard that the highest compression level 12 for FLAC(comparing to the default 5) will cause some low-end decoder board with a weak CPU to output inconsistent rattling sound..

[NeilDSouza]

Does lossless sound different?
The answer is lost in the question ...

[NiSHAN]

Playing audio files is CPU straining? WHAT YEAR IS THAT?!!!

[nancydon]

Your video has gotten me to thinking about sound quality and CDs. I think the amount of error correction actually going on during playback has an effect. When I was selling audio in my younger days, the place where I was working had two copies of the same CD that we used on the sales floor. One of them got quite scratched up, so badly we doubted it could play. We tried it - and it played with no skips or obvious errors in the output. Then we played the one what was "perfect." It sounded much more open, much better imaging, like an upgrade. These were the same CD, from the same source (it was a demo disc from one of our manufacturers). We concluded that it must have had something to do with how much error correcting the CD player had to do with the scratched CD. What do you think?

[alexanderjones]

I had a lot of noise on my PC when playing FLAC or MP3 files through headphones, or even when not playing any audio when the CPU was busy. I put a ferrite on each side of my headphone cable and now the noise is gone.

[snoochpounder]

i love that paul asks the question first to the point so i can skip the essay questions most people send in and get straight to the response

[cablebrain]

Does the decompression of flac files, the actual reconstructive math processes, aside from noise issues, cause jitter?

[Clubbow]

Is the digital signal coming from the transport perfect or is the transport processing a perfect signal before its processed to analog via dac, I’m confused. If the signal is coming from the transport is perfect and not proceed, why would I pay thousands for a music transport. Can any body explain.

[FrancescoScinico]

I took the test between lossless and lossy 320 Kbps and could not tell the difference or actually liked the 320 Kbps version better at times, depending on the type of music.

[carljung]

do you hear differences in sound for digital cables during A/B tests? Or just the rest of the time.

[charlesludwig]

Paul gave a palpable answer on this topic, not the gobbledygook I expected.

[mark]

As someone who solely listens to music on my iPhone, using the earbuds that come with the phone (with lightning connector), I've used AIFF for years. Am I missing out on "finer sounds", or would it be negligible by switching to Apple Lossless or WAV?