Audio Formats - What Does What and What It All Means

gibbsy

The only thing that components can do is to enhance the original recording, in some cases it can show the flaws in the recording as well. Having owned titles on both CD and SACD the SACD is capable of showing more detail in that original recording and even the quality of the player can play a very important part. If the detail is there is can get exploited, for good or bad.

paulriordan

I will try to describe my understanding (and viewpoint) below:

There are only two formats of digital audio data.

PCM and DSD !!  All of the other terms we use are about compression (lossy or lossless), the packaging of the data and the transmission of data.

DSD Wiki
PCM - Wiki

The vast majority of music is recorded in PCM and then mixed, edited and mastered in that format.  PCM allows you to have different bit-depths and sampling frequencies and using software you can manipulate this data to other bit depths and/or sampling frequencies.  Obviously this manipulation can not magically add additional detail that wasn't there in the original recordings.

DSD was created specifically for archiving old analogue material with no manipulation.  The majority of material made available in DSD (via SACD or downloads) will have been mixed or edited at some point which means it has more than likely been through a stage of conversion to/from PCM.  There is some material our there which has been recorded directly to DSD but it is rare.

MP3 and FLAC are just carriers for PCM data. As we all know MP3 works by compressing the data and throwing away some of the data using some very clever algorithms.  FLAC on the other hand works by compressing data again using algorithms but in such a way that it can be uncompressed and all of the data remains in tact. ALAC is essentially the same as FLAC - except it has Apple instead of Free in its name.  The benefit of using these carriers, apart from smaller files, is the ability to tag the files with data about the music.

WAV - is basically just a simple PCM file (with simple metadata and is not compressed.

There are lots of different pieces of software out there that will allow you to convert between these formats/carriers.  So long as you use a lossless carrier then it does not really matter which one you use other than compatibility with hardware.

What do I use?  all of my CDs were ripped to FLAC as a carrier and are now stored on a network drive.  I have some music in DSD format either ripped from SACDs or downloaded from some of the music sites that use DSD.  The Digital to Analogue Converter in my main music system will playback native PCM and DSD so I can play them in their native format.  I convert FLAC files to MP3 for use on a USB stick in the car (with all the other noise in the car it doesn't make any difference).  Any files I download that come as WAV or ALAC or AIFF get converted to FLAC.  I use ROON to play back music on my systems at home which has the advantage of being able to re-sample / convert format on the fly - this is useful when playing back to devices that do not support the carriers or formats.  There are are arguments on various forums about WAV vs. FLAC - with something like ROON you can get you server to decompress the data and transmit to your playback device this decompressed data.  ROON has several other advantages but not necessarily relevant to this thread.

Hopefully some of you will find the above useful.

By the way I am new to the forum so be gentle with me

Paul

dannnielll

Nicely constructed. Just one caveat, the action of digitizing ,irrespective of the resolution or data rate is lossy,to the extent that data changes below the thresholds are lost and time changes in less than the sample interval are lost. However beyond that  the information can be stored and reproduced indefinitely without added noise or loss of resolution