FLAC vs WAV vs MP3 | How to Choose the Right Audio File Format
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- čas přidán 23. 07. 2024
- In this video, I discuss the most common audio file types and why you should choose one over the other.
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#flac #digitalaudio #mp3 - Věda a technologie
Being a car audio basshead, this is great information in my attempt to improve the quality of my sound since we have to use some type of digital media due to extreme vibration. Thanks for explaining everything!
Oh, so you drive that boom-boom car that drives down my street every now and again?
There are lots of acronyms and 'in-speak' in audio, so explanations like this are super helpful.
I generally listen to mp3 320kbps and recently started listening with FLAC and can't really tell the difference even though I know FLAC is better or might u tell if you listen on really expensive headphones or sound system
depend of your headphone and your player !!
u will see that big difference with audiophile headphones and HI-FI players...
and then you throw your mp3 players in the trash
its a risky move if u wanna take it😁
@@hmdhmd4887 Now my 50% of music are in FLAC format 😁
@@Yuji_2002 welcome to the pure sounds 😄
Read my other rant post on this forum and you'll find out the real reason you can't hear a difference. Your DAC is delta-sigma lossy. Your OS is using a crappy DSP remixer and making it double lossy.
Get an R2R or multibit external DAC, decent amplification, and superior headphones or speakers. Then be amazed at the OMG moment and be prepared to be a little bit angry on what you've been missing out on for so long.
Once you feel it sounds better, there's no going back
Very helpful info. Thanks mate. :)
Hey Mike ,as long as the videos are truly informative & enriching .. people will continue watching it !
Thank you Anand I'll do my best 👌
Truth . Flac sounds way better than WMA (MP3) and it is worth to take the extra time and storage space to convert into it. It is just to get a levely sound out of the music to enjoy listening to it.
Here's my plan - Astell&Kern Kann Max - 1Tb microSD card.
1 pair of IEMs with bass emphasis, another pair with more neutral balance.
Download/buy highest format audio possible (nothing less than CD quality)
Convert to FLAC 96Khz - 24 bits
Experts say you can't hear anything better than CD quality 44.1Khz - 16 bit but other experts say the extra headroom allows for the algorithm/aliasing/artefacting to be handled better... OK fine!
This will give me way over a thousand albums on 1 micro SD card, more music than I could ever dream of when walking around or maybe driving.
Boom, I'm happy with my plan. 😃
I've changed my mind already - there is no point as a listener of the finished product to go above CD quality - 44.1 Khz - 16-bit. Add I'll encode the WAV files as FLAC so I can add metadata and album art etc. And also, I won't need an expensive 1Tb card - probably a 256Gb will be way more than enough.
Better. 🙂
You're misinformed. Also the KANN MAX features ESS ES9038Q2M Quad-DAC chipset, which means it is using the "lossy guesstimator" algorithm that throws out the lossless digital sample points and substitutes them with its own "curve fitting".
Upsampling 44 to 96 is a NO-NO. That's because 44 doesn't evenly divide into 96. That's going to make your already lossy curve fitting get messed up and make it actually sound WORSE than 44kHz. When upsampling, 44 should go to 88 and 48 to 96. But your convertor's upsampling algorithm won't be nearly as good as the guesstimator algorithm that already does this in the ES9038Q2M chip.
24/96 is absolutely superior to 16/44 but only under the right conditions such as the original master was done in 24/96.
Next, you want a DAC that doesn't use lossy guesstimators like the ESS chip does. ESS chip is notorious for "death by a thousand needles" -- literally sharp treble stabbing sounds just below audibility that are hitting your ears thousands of times per song. Go multibit or R2R for the DAC.
You're right about storing it as FLAC instead of WAV, that gets you over double the storage space and you lose nothing.
You're right if the original source was 16/44 that there is no point upsampling above that. With the exception being if you're doing EQ, then 24/44 will get you less rounding errors and more "digital headroom" to avoid potential clipping errors.
In today's renaissance of HiRes audio, downsampling a 24/96 or 24/192 to 16/44 will make it worse than the same recording originally done in 16/44. Don't get stuck on any one sample rate by converting everything to it. Instead, just KEEP the original sample rate of the source and don't F with it by up- or down- sampling. Changing from 16 bit to 24 bit doesn't hurt it, but everything else will.
All the above is pure Truth. The next suggestion is more subjective and depends on your individual needs. For $10 a month you can stream 16/44 CD quality of nearly every album in the world. From anywhere on any device, without worrying about storage, losing your purchases, or anything like that. Tidal, Qobuz, Deezer, Apple, Amazon, they all provide CD quality and above. The age of streaming is here. A renaissance of having every CD in the world in your collection, almost. IF that sounds better than owning and managing your files on some little 256GB drive, then yeah, I say embrace the dawning of the new age. If not, then fine. Different strokes for different folks. But doesn't change the fact everything I said in the first part of this response is 100% truth.
this was so well explained
Thank you so much!
People are a bit sneaky with these comparisons. 320kbps is really, really good and on most systems, unless they are high-end and your ears are less than 40 years old you are not likely to notice the difference between it and FLAC. If you use Bluetooth you are wasting your time with FLAC whatever the price. Many reviewers hide behind this fact though and will make out that people are buying 128kbps files which is really not the case. These days unless you are hanging on to your old LG V40 for its headphone jack it is utterly pointless to have FLAC for mobile listening. Half my stuff is FLAC but at 56 I genuinely can't tell the difference and I am not sure I ever could.
Those damn reviewers and their agendas! Look, I'm going to be 40 in a couple weeks and I can tell the difference between 328 and FLAC in any blind test you put me through. But I have trained my ears for evaluating gear so I am looking for imperfections. 328 may be just fine for the casual listener. However, my goal with this channel is to introduce and educate people to the hobby of HiFi and in doing so comes the responsibility of showing my audience the best ways to consume their favorite music. I do appreciate the comment and I sort of half way agree 😀
@@mykandrewdelusional
What about the difference going from FLAC or MP3 to vinyl? Do you notice the difference? Vinyl beats all of them.
*Correction a CD is 1411 Kilobits per second not Kilobytes.
Exactly. Not to be "THAT GUY," of course.
Nah...You know what? BE that guy! Be that guy and be PROUD of it! Bits and bytes aren't the same!!!
Thanks for the explanation. I am a collector and avoid digital files as much as I can but inevitably some music is only available in digital format. So, I started downloading FLAC files from reputed sites in standard CD quality and Hi-Res. I played them back on VLC media player in a fairly new and potent laptop through USB connection directly to my amplifier USB input port. It sounds decent but the music skips one fraction of a second in no distinguishable pattern. What is going wrong? The media Player? the DAC in my amplifier? How can I confirm where the problem lies?
Thank you. I like your channel, always well presented and concise information. Keep up the great work.
Thank you Chris, much appreciated
Great video as always...
Thanks Joseph 😊
Thanks! I recently got into data hoarding and I exclusively download my music in .wav of those I purchase on Bandcamp Fridays haha
WAV still has most of the ultrasonic frequencies stripped out of it. You are better off with MP3 but adding back the missing ultrasonic frequencies so it will be better than WAV and as good as vinyl.
THANK FOR SHARING VALUABLE INFORMATION , THANK U VERY MUCH SIR
I took the time to learn about the different formats since I have ripped a lot of CDs. My top choice is FLAC but I sometimes rip to 320kbps CBR or VBR between 192kbps and 320kbps. The CDs I really love get the FLAC treatment. But you know, 320kbps rips can sound surprisingly good. Ripper of choice is Exact Audio Copy and/or dbPoweramp. Also, think of it this way- a WAV file is like a RAW photo in photography. All the data is there. An MP3 is like a JPEG where it is compressed and some of the info has been stripped. As a photographer myself I always shoot in RAW. Nice video, Mike. Thanks!
I've taken photos through 30 years. and I've printed and I've shown photos in devices and internet as usual today. And nobody knows if it was RAW or JPG. :D I'm a crazy troll ! (edit)
@@georgemartinezza I do a lot of music photography so I shoot RAW because it gives me way more flexibility than JPEG. If all I did was shoot at ISO 100 on sunny days then yeah, I could shoot JPEG. Or if I was shooting indoors using strobes I could shoot JPEG. For concert photography at high ISO I need RAW files.
@@nelsono4315 concerts or nature- example:
I have nikon 75-- 300mm zoom ...
RAW works better for me (in landscapes ) . or throught city urban photography too.
JPG almost everytime .
in audio, I commonly have WAV, I don't have a very wide long playlist, even so I don't follow HiFi in portable, for the car is enough 320 bitrate.
Can those ripping programs rip to AIFF?
limewire, now that's something I haven't heard in like 15+ years haha
Lol 😆
I did not know that about FLAC - I'm enjoying my T- shirt (STEREO) 😄
Glad you like the shirt!! 😀
Hi!
Thank U For Your explain!
Thomas
You're welcome
I use FLAC and OPUS files as my main audio file formats.
Nice I'll have to look into OPUS
@@mykandrew You would be shocked. OPUS is the successor of OGG and it is the BEST sound quality out of all lossy formats. It's even better than AAC at 320kbps.
@@shawnorjiakor At lower bitrates too.
@@zugo-tg7125 Facts as well. These days for portable listening... OPUS is more than enough for my needs. FLAC only for critical listening, but OPUS can be good on that too.
@@shawnorjiakor All that’s left is for device compatibility/support to catch up in as many places as possible.
Lots of phones have an in-built app called "Amplifier".
It boosts weak frequencies of any given audio.
But. When I give it a ".flac" with above 48khz of frequency sampling, it just doesn't boost anything.
Stuck on 48khz on ".flac" brothers.
But I'm cool with it, don't complain at all 'cuz it already sounds magnificent.
Also, nothing below ".FLAC" and ".WAV".
Anyway, got any explaination on why it happens?
Would love to boost 192khz of any given song, like "Easy Lover" by Phil Collins.
I am in the process of re-ripping much of my music. I tried ripping a few to WAV but stopped, mostly, because it takes about 5 times longer than ripping to FLAC
FLAC is definitely good enough
@@mykandrew agreed
Stick to MP3, but add the ultrasonic frequencies that were taken out of the MP3, WAV and FLAC formats. Then it should be as good as vinyl.
@@dtz1000 ???
WAV is great for editing audio with out compression that’s the main use for WAV. But then I’m not a every day listener. As a listener to many to choose from. Depends on content. Speech audio books v High quality music.
So it sounds like I should export my music to be published as WAV but save it for myself as a FLAC
Thanx for validating my choice to switch from .mp3 to flac, man. Yes it takes more space than mp3, but it is so worth it when dj -ing.
Quick question tho.... 16 bit flac at 44.1kHz vs 24 bit flac at 48kHz ... can u tell the difference? I'm steering away from. The later because the file size is damn near as big as wav 🙆🏾♂️.
This one track I have mind u, it's almost 9 min long, is a flac encoded at 24 bit 1789 kbps at 48kHz, and it's about 90 mb in size ... the audio is pristine, but, it really different from a regular 44.1kHz 16 bit flac?.
Thank u for ur advice.
Liked and subscribed !!
There shouldn't be an audible difference even though many will say otherwise.
@@mykandrew thank u !!
Very little difference, however, the subconsciously audible artifacts of the 22K Nyquest limit get pushed to 24K when using 48K, and this moves the artifact nasties of the brick wall filter up a few thousand hertz. So the inaudible micro-prick ear-stabbings which give a subconscious feeling of fatigue and being "beaten up" by your music, move into higher slightly less audible frequencies. But other than that, no appreciable difference. Going to 96kHz or 192kHz, on the other hand, is a subtle, small, but absolutely wonderful difference, assuming you have a good R2R or multibit external DAC that can properly resolve those upgraded improvements.
Before becoming an expat, I ripped all my CDs to FLAC. Have those same albums on my phone using Vorbis at Q6. I'll switch to OPUS once Android support gets more solidified.
Last year I recorded hundreds of CD's as WAVW files using a $25 USB blueray drive and Windows 10 Media Player. Took several months to get through them, and I ended up with 256gigs of WAV files. Last Saturday, I bought a Hifi Rose180 and its matching CD drive. I'm waiting for the 4 TB SATA drive I ordered, then I will rerecord some of the same CD's to see how they sound compared to the Media Player recordings.
Use EAC instead.
@@zugo-tg7125 Thx, but I'm about to dump the Rose unit - without a doubt the most frustrating thing I've ever owned.
Interesting video. But flac, wav and CD are all flawed because they have most of the ultrasonic frequencies stripped out of them. This is why many people still prefer vinyl.
Not going to lie mostly stick to MP3 😐 but at the time most mp3 players didn't support it at the time or wav but now things have changed
For me it stood between Flac and Wav when I ripped my 2400 CDs but in the end Wav won.
Same here, I noticed WAV was better overall on music I’ve known since the 70s.
How big is your hard drive out of curiosity?
@@mykandrew I have lots of big hard drives but I guess that you want to know how much space my CDs in the wav-format wants and that is 1 499 890 866 462 byte or 1 403 407 Mb or 1397 Gb or 1,3641 Tb
They fit precisely on a 1.5 Tb hdd with other words.
39 of those are HDCDs which is bigger than normal CDs and 252 of them are SACDs but just ripped in CD quality.
@@mykandrew I’ve only 800 CDs and they take up 25% of a 2TB drive. I’m 63 so I reckon it’ll see me out! 😂😂😂 (Quite a few doubles and larger there, my Innuos groups them as one)
FLAC and WAV are both lossless and should be indistinguishable from each other. FLAC has much better tagging capabilities. A huge advantage if you like detailed meta data in your databases.
Storage is not an issue for me, I use WAV.
Cannot compare to FLAC upsampled 176KHz WAV is even better the conversion to analogue is very delicate.
I guess mp3 iis more duitable with much more quality
There's no need for compression there's more than enough room on hard disks and SSD, compression (FLAC) ruins audio.
There is only one perfect format and that is wav.
Yes WAV sounds even better when it's up sampled to 176KHz. AIFF and WAV are essentially the same.
Fight the misinformation that's virally spreading, that there's barely any difference between MP3 and FLAC.
These usually come from some website claiming to A/B test you on MP3 vs FLAC. The audio is played through the browser that integer-misaligns a 44.1kHz signal to 48kHz, automatically making it lossy and rolled off in transient accuracy. Next, the browser does not have exclusive mode control over an external DAC. It means it goes through the operating system's mixer and gets upsampled/downsampled AND remixed by the totally crap quality DSP of Windows. Now it's been raped twice. For a third raping, it will go through one of the shyttiest cheapo china delta-sigma DACs which are LOSSY and actually DISCARD the true BIT SAMPLES on the recording, with a cheapo guesstimate curve-fitting algorithm. The fourth raping then comes from the notorious amount of electromagnetic noise going on inside the computer case, with GPUs, CPUs, ultra high frequency RAM, and other beasts running around in a jungle of radio-frequency and electromagnetic interference. There's literally an electric motor running a fan, unshielded, within inches of this little cheapo DAC! Goodness gracious! This isn't your typical "hiss" type of white noise but rather is stuff that creates really weird and tortured boosts and impedances at random harmonic intervals that are shifting around, inaudibly but degrading the whole experience. Sound stage or 3d holographic imaging are utterly blurred and ruined. This, then, is the "fourth raping".
Now let's say you got away from the fraudulent website tests of FLAC and MP3 and got a good clean media player doing local files to compare. All the above is still going to mangle your music so much that it's going to be hard to tell the difference.
OK so what's the answer?
The answer is to use a TRULY lossless R2R or multibit DAC that's external to your computer and isolated from the OS up/down-sampling, OS remixing, the EMI RFI noise, and the crappy el-cheapo lossy "guesstimator" delta-sigma DAC on the motherboard. If this DAC were a turntable it would be a $6 Fisher Price kid's turntable you got at a garage sale. We're supposed to use THAT to tell the difference between FLAC and MP3? Are you freaking kidding me now? A lossy DAC, what is this guy talking about? Digital is digital! Oh no, sonny, let me edumacate you!
Note that 99% of DACs these days are delta-sigma which throw out the raw data and use Johnny's guesstimate interpolation algorithms--and thus are LOSSY. That's right, lossy even BEFORE it hits the analog amplification stage of the DAC, which is literally crappier than the worst clock radio you ever heard in a cheap motel.
Assuming you get a good R2R or multibit DAC (Google is your friend here), and then assuming you have high quality amplification and speakers, then FLAC will sound so much better than MP3 that you will become almost violently snobby toward MP3 and anyone spreading misinformation about how it's barely any difference. Seriously, cymbals on mp3 sound more like shredding paper instead of what they should sound like: metallic rainbow shimmers coming from a wormhole into an alternate dimension.
Lossless audio and especially HiRes lossless audio is the future. It is our ancestral birthright that was stolen from us by the corporate music economy for over 40 years. There's a renaissance going on and we not only recovered the state of the art audio quality we had back in 1983, we're now going to new levels. But 99% of the world is left behind still, from the "era of convenience" that iPod and MP3 left us, after it NUKED the culture of hifi and a nation of people who used to love hearing good music on good stereo systems. DACs of today are using lossy delta-sigma guesstimator curve-fitting algorithms instead of obeying what the bits tell them to do. To save money and make more profit.
Educate yourselves and make the journey into the land of high fidelity music. You deserve it. High quality music for the masses!
Hey that’s not nice. I have a $10 Bluetooth speaker lol
All I heard in this video is condescension.