Audio Formats - What Does What and What It All Means

Toon Army

SACD remains my favourite format and always sound great on a good system. The one time I will always stop doing anything else and listen attentively. Just a shame the discs cost so much.

addyeddy

Cannot understand why record companies haven't reissued discs now more people have the equipment to play them  The outlay for them must be minimal

NicolasB

It may be an abbreviation for "Direct Stream Digital", but I doubt that it's an acronym.

To be an acronym, it has to be pronounced as a word, not as initials. For example, "laser" is an acronym, so are "radar", "NATO", "UNESCO", etc. but (for example) "UN" is not an acronym, because it's pronounced "You Enn" rather than "Un".

Chester

@NicolasB My god, you learn something new everyday!  DSD (like BBC) is an initialism.

It does mean however that TLA is a paradox!

Thanks for rewiring my brain.  I'm going to have a headache now!

And back to the topic...

setthecontrols

I would have made the same mistake about acronyms!  I like the TLA reference... reminds me of the dictionary definition of recursion: see recursion

As you say, back to topic... thanks for the article Ed - a very informative read.

NicolasB

Unless "TLA" stands for Three Letter Abbreviation.

Ensor

In fact there is NO difference between FLAC and WAV. Think of it like RAR or ZIP, optimised for audio files. What comes out is bit for bit identical to what went in.

Big advantages over WAV are the compression and metadata...how can you organise your music library without metadata?

MacVee

A well formatted article.

k-spin

Yeah, DVD-Audio could do stereo at 24 bit/192kHz and up to 5.1 surround at 24 bit/96kHz.

Pecker

I'm at a loss as to why there's not more use of WMA Lossless.  Free with every Windows PC and a piece of cake to use.