I’m a bit confounded. In playing with Windom I listened to some recordings I haven’t listened to in a long while. I Happened to have an recording of Rainy Night in Georgia, in both AIF and WAV . I suspect i ripped the CD to AIF, then converted to WAV.
I can understand why a flac might not sound as good as a pre uncompressed file due to CPU overhead, but why would WAV sound more natural in my system?
DS/Windom/BII@100/ Atmasphere tube pre- BHK300’s/TAD CR1 fed via Ethernet from Mac Pro trash can /64G
There was much discussion about this general file format difference in another thread and some interesting thoughts by Ted to consider.
My experience is that I heard noticeable differences between flac and aif (clearly better) and very small differences between aif and wav (still a tiny bit better in bass in my case).
Not sure about the reason…the only difference between aif and wav is that wav stores no tags. If that’s the reason I don’t know. I think other influences to different rips are stronger, so here I’m with Ted to look somewhere else for the reason than in the file format. Just the difference of flax to aif was so obvious for me that I use it incl. the convenience of storing tags (which I wouldn’t have with wav).
My setup changed to the better since those tests, so it might be worth to do it again at some very boring rainy days
In my system (computer) the wav files allways sound litle more “cozy” better than the flac One, when i compared the same file from example hdtracks, and i buy better 24/96 cheaper and not diffrence at all from the 24/192
