High resolution downloads are changing the way we enjoy music, opening up possibilities undreamed of back in digital’s early days…
It’s hard to understate the impact that Compact Disc made, upon its introduction back in 1982. At the time, the music world was very different, with vinyl regarded as the only serious way to play music. Found everywhere from broadcast studios to the local youth club, LPs were the world’s favourite music format. Still, at over thirty years old, black plastic was knocking on and sales were on the wane, down 40% from its 1975 high watermark. The scene was set for the brave new world of digital audio…
What music lovers needed now was a small, convenient, high quality music carrier, and CD was it. Hailed as a miracle of modernity, it fused two technologies – a digital audio coding system developed by Sony, and a laser optical disc storage system developed by Philips.
Legend has it that Sony had wanted the new ‘Digital Audio Disc’ to be 12 inches wide, just like an LP, as they were worried that album artwork wouldn’t look good on Philips’ proposed 5″ disc. Philips had wanted cardboard sleeves, just like LPs, but Sony insisted on a plastic ‘jewel case’ to give the product a more tangible feel. So when CD finally emerged, it was full of compromises limited by the technology and what the big companies thought the public wanted.
SOUND AFFECTS
Given that the average early eighties turntable could scarcely spin at the right speed, the new digital disc was a revelation. Sonically CD was was streets ahead of most people’s vinyl experience – and had the added benefit of being immune from surface noise, static crackle and disc wear too. There were some golden eared hi-fi hacks around who didn’t like its sound, describing it as a little stark and two dimensional. But by and large, CD was a quantum leap forward…
Despite Philips’ famous description of it as giving “pure, perfect sound forever”, people soon started noticing problems however. Compared to analogue, early 16-bit digital could sound spiky and hard, giving cymbals and female vocals a coldness that just didn’t seem right. Lab measurements showed that whilst CD’s 16-bit digital system gave very low distortion on the loudest parts of the music, it distorted heavily on the quieter bits – the exact opposite to how analogue LP behaved. Worse still, the digital system was prone to distorting most in the upper midband and treble, just where the ear is most sensitive…
This was down to the way digital audio encodes the analogue musical waveform, and it applies to every format that uses the Pulse Code Modulation digital system, such as CD, MP3, AAC and FLAC. With PCM, the two basic factors that determine the sound quality are bit depth (which determines the quality with which the analogue signal is digitised), and the sampling frequency (which is the number of times per second that the analogue signal is digitised). CD is a 16-bit, 44.1kHz system, giving a frequency response of 5-22,000Hz and 96dB dynamic range.
A good analogy is radio sound quality. The sound of AM radio can be likened to digital systems running low sampling frequencies (giving a rolled off treble) and low bit depths (making for a coarse and flat sound lacking in detail and subtlety). FM radio, with its more extended treble and smoother, more sophisticated sound can be compared to a high resolution digital system. As the bit depth increases, you get a deeper and more delicate sound, and as the sampling rate rises, you get a wider frequency range.
The graph above shows the difference in the way a real sine wave looks on an oscilloscope, and how a low resolution digital approximation of it appears – you can see how the latter is simply unable to trace the analogue waveform smoothly. So the more bits you use, the more natural the music sounds, and the faster the samples, the wider the frequency range. CD’s 16/44.1 digital system was state of the art in 1982, but it didn’t take long for it to get past its sell-by date.
Malcolm Hawksford, Professor of Psychoacoustics at Essex University, reckons that, “CD’s digital specification was almost good enough for audiophile music reproduction. It was near the limit, but in my view probably a bit marginal. Ideally, at least 20-bit resolution at 60 kHz sampling frequency would have been better”.
BIT BETTER
Compact Disc became a technological time trap for audiophiles. Its almost-good-enough digital specification put the development of digital in suspended animation, locking us in to an outdated nineteen eighties way of digitising music. No surprise then that in recent years, many hi-fi purists have been turning back to vinyl which – being analogue – offers almost infinite levels of resolution. “Analogue audio systems are limited not by digital bits, but atoms,” argues Hi-Fi World magazine’s Paul Rigby. “Where LP record playback fails is in the mechanical tolerances of the playback equipment, such as bearing friction and so on, rather than the resolution of the format itself. With digital though, it can only be so good and no better.
Happily, DVD-Audio and Super Audio Compact Disc (SACD) arrived at the end of the nineties to save the day, offering far superior sound to CD. With the former offering true 24bit resolution, it came over as punchy and powerful with tremendous detail, plus a wonderfully smooth low distortion sound right across the audio band.
“I have seen some really good recordings over the last decade where 16-bit was just not enough to hold all the information,” says B&W digital research engineer Albert Yong., “and given the opportunity to then listen to those recordings in 24-bits, they just blew the 16bit version out of the water”.
Although 24-bit DVD-A sounded superb, it never got off the ground commercially. It was expensive, you needed a special type of DVD player and most importantly of all, retailers simply didn’t want to sell it. With DVD video discs making the stores a mint (at the time), there was no reason to devote shelf space to less commercial audiophile music releases. DVD-Audio’s life was over just a couple of years after its inception, and no one missed it except a select bunch of audiophiles who’d heard 24-bit digital and couldn’t go back. But, whilst the disc went the way of the Dodo, its coding system would live on…
Just as DVD-A’s sun was setting, so digital file downloads began making great inroads into the music marketplace. The MP3 format was no great shakes sonically but it was only the first wave; it might have sounded bad, but it ushered in a new way of obtaining music that no longer had any limits. Whereas CD was frozen in time and space, committed to its dated 16-bit, 44.1kHz flavour, internet distributed music could arrive in a way that suits the artist, label and listener.
Enter Free Lossless Audio Codec in 2001 – which was an altogether more intelligent way of encoding music. Rather than the compressed system that MP3 used which reduces file sizes by about 80% by cutting out most of the music you can’t hear (and some that you can), FLAC used a clever ‘lossless’ packing system that doesn’t remove any music at all, and saves about 30% to 50% of space. “It’s a problem-free system,” says Professor Hawksford, “if the arithmetic is performed correctly and the compressed files are not corrupted then there are no errors in the reconstructed output.”
Whilst we’ve seen a number of lossless systems, from Apple Lossless (ALAC) to Windows Media Audio Lossless (WMA Lossless), the Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) has emerged triumphant for music-loving hi-fi buffs. The spiritual successor to MP3, it’s an open-source system that’s not tied to any one manufacturer, which explains it success. Better still, it comes in more than one resolution. Whilst you can encode your CDs to FLAC keeping their 16-bit, 44.1kHz resolution, FLAC can also come in 24-bit form too. “The system is so flexible that it can take anything from 4 to 32 bits and sample rates up to 655350Hz in 1 Hz steps – it can certainly replace 24/96 DVD-Audio”, says Albert Yong.
BETTER THAN CD
Compared to the mastertape, CD gives a decent but unsophisticated facsimile. Its 16/44.1 specification boasts a dynamic range of around 96dB, which is ample for most music work. The trouble is though, the quieter the signal is, the more the system distorts using the PCM digital system, which effectively sucks out the atmosphere – all the subtle ambient details – of a piece of music. In a direct A-B comparison with the mastertape, “16-bit sounds slightly vague,” says Paul Rigby, “like a primitive digital camera it simply loses the subtlety and fine detail; it’s less easy to live with than hi res digital”.
Theoretically, 24-bit digital has a resolution of 144dB, which is more than enough (130dB is the threshold of pain for the human ear), but the problem is, as Professor Hawksford notes, of actually finding studios capable of recording at anywhere near this resolution. “Not many recordings fully exploit the capabilities of CD, let alone higher resolution formats”, he notes…
Bowers &Wilkins’ Albert Yong agrees that we’re a good way away from achieving true 24-bit masters, but still we can do much better than old fashioned 16-bit, and people can easily hear the difference.
“We have seen some extremely good recordings lately, when the entire recording chain is done right. We can potentially get up to around 20 to 22 bits at the moment, and they do sound a lot better. The difference is in the detail. Sounds generally are more open, and there is an extra level to airiness to the music. Voice and instruments sounds closer to live, and more dynamic as well”.
THE MECHANICS
Like any other music file, you can either ‘rip’ FLAC copies of your existing CDs, or download load them from music sites such as Society of Sound. We’ve structured our site to make downloading FLAC a breeze. After you’ve logged into the download manager it’s simply a case of choosing an album and downloading the format you want. You can choose which folder the music goes to using the Settings within the app and then simply pull into your player.
If you’re looking to build up a FLAC library of your existing CD collection, then a good starting point for ripping is Exact Audio Copy or dBpowerAMP. These are freely downloadable applications for Windows, commonly thought to be the best sounding and most bug-free. Mac Users can try Max or MacFlac.
Once you’ve downloaded your FLAC music, or ripped it from CD using the aforementioned applications, you’ll need to play it. Currently, neither Microsoft’s Windows Media Player or Apple’s iTunes support FLAC without modifications.
If you wish to import FLAC files to iTunes on MacOS we recommend you try a program known as Max for MacOS X 10, which can convert and rip PCM files and import them to your iTunes library. For more information please see here.
Both Windows Media Player and iTunes have their own equivalents (WMA Lossless and Apple Lossless respectively) but these are tied to the operating system providers, whereas FLAC is of course a free, open source system like MP3. So for Windows-based systems, we recommend you download Winamp which is a highly flexible media player that also supports burning 16-bit formats to CD. There are other media players you may wish to try such as Songbird, Media Monkey and Foobar2000, which is generally agreed to be the best sounding on the Windows platform. When you start up your music player, it should automatically search for all your digital music and add it to the library. SongBird will even go online and look for the artwork too, just like iTunes or WMP. which is a slick player for both Windows and Mac, with a nice clean interface.
Through their bundled music players, both Microsoft and Apple have chosen to support certain file formats (WMA and AAC respectively). Whilst these players offer some flexibility (they both play MP3, for example), they’re both committed to their own Lossless formats. so FLAC is excluded. However, there are now ‘bolt on’ FLAC players for iTunes.
Fluke is freeware that works as ‘plug in’ for iTunes (Mac platform), but can be buggy. Amarra Mini by Sonic Studio is a more sophisticated system that piggybacks on to iTunes, replacing much of its audio code with a superior sounding and more flexible system. Sound is excellent but you pay for it; the basic Junior version which gives FLAC playback up to 24/96 starts at $99.
Audirvana Plus (www.audirvana.com) is another fine application that, like Amarra, shuts down certain parts of your computer to minimise drain on CPU resources, to (so the theory goes) give better sound. There’s a free trial download but you’ll have to pay $49 for the full version. It now offers optional integration with iTunes and is a strong, stable performer. For Mac users, its combination of value and performance is currently hard to beat.
It’s easy to burn 16-bit FLAC files on to a CD-R for playback in a conventional hi-fi or car CD player. Winamp is a free player which also supports burning FLAC16 files to CD. If you wish to use a proper CD authoring software, then Roxio RecordNow MusicLab 10 Premier (Windows, $49.99) or Roxio Toast 11 Titanium (Mac. $99.95) are worth considering because the standard Windows or Mac music players won’t handle FLAC, either 16 or 24-bit.
Once you’ve got your 24-bit FLAC files and FLAC player; now it’s time to get the music out to your ears. There are several ways of doing this:
- The simplest is to take an analogue line output from your computer soundcard. This is likely to have a 3.5mm mini-jack plug; we recommend a high quality bespoke cable such as Chord’s iChord for around £30. Although it will give a decent sound, particularly if you have a good quality soundcard, it is not ideal because computers are electrically ‘noisy’ environments, and it is best if at all possible to pipe out the digital signal away from the PC or Mac.
- A dedicated USB DAC like HRT’s Music Streamer II (£160) gives excellent results, and connects up as simply as a digital camera; just plug the USB lead into the computer at one end and the HRT into the other. It will stream digital music at up to 24/96 resolution through its RCA line level analogue phono outputs (which connect into the ‘Aux’ input of your amplifier) and it sports an asynchronous USB connection, so the high quality clock onboard will control the computer’s digital datastream. This gives tighter, smoother sound compared to standard asynchronous USB, as a result of lower jitter.
- If your PC or Mac has a digital output, you can run a good quality optical or coaxial lead into a modern digital convertor such as an Arcam rDAC (£300) and you have a proper, high quality 24-bit FLAC playout system, that will give superior sound to many CD players. It’s important to note here that Windows users should download the latest ASIO drivers; these provide a ‘source direct’ function, ensuring the digital datastream goes direct from the FLAC software player to the USB digital output. Many of the latest DACs, like the Arcam rDAC and Cambridge Audio DAC Magic Plus (£350), also have USB inputs that can be driven directly from computers.
- Wireless streaming is the third, and for many the preferred option. Logitech’s Squeezebox Touch (£259) is one of the most inexpensive and convenient ways of getting full 24-bit FLAC replay at up to 96kHz sampling rate. It comes with bespoke playback software that lets your computer control it via your home wireless network, giving an iTunes-style user interface. Generally, these work very well and are an excellent way of giving multiform functionality. Although it has built-in line level analogue outputs which are ideal for use in a second system, again audiophiles should use its digital output into a hi-fi DAC, such as the aforementioned Arcam rDAC or Cambridge Audio DAC Magic. For even better sound at a slightly higher price, the £500 Rega DAC is hard to beat at or anywhere near the cost.
- For those with more money to spend, there’s a whole host of network music players, from the Cambridge Audio NP30 (£400) and Musical Fidelity M1 CLiC (£1,300) to Naim’s NDX (£3,000) and Linn’s Akurate DSM (£5,600). These are all excellent products at their price; the more money you spend, the better. Also, the more expensive they are, the less the need for a separate DAC; the Naim and Linn deliver superb results out of the box. It all depends on how far you want to take your networked music; whether it’s just another handy way of playing your favourite tunes, or a purpose-designed no-compromise system to eke out the very best from digital.
You can also check our recent 24-bit blog post to see how fellow audiophiles listen to 24-bit FLAC
THE EDGE
There’s an old maxim in the hi-fi industry, borrowed from the early days of the computer pioneers – “garbage in, garbage out”. Any speaker can only be as good as the system driving it, and any system is limited by the quality of the original source material. That’s why B&W, as a manufacturer of premium, leading edge loudspeakers, takes FLAC very seriously. In 24-bit form it’s the modern day incarnation of digital’s finest hour, DVD-Audio, but even better because it’s almost infinitely upgradeable and future-proof. Professor Hawksford gives it the nod. “FLAC has a place in the future for high quality audio. It is good for transporting files on the Internet as it typically halves download time. It is unlikely that for lossless compression there will be significant improvements”, Hawksford believes.
The ease with which it can be delivered to a computer means that anyone who’s capable of sending their friend a digital photo can now download and play high resolution FLAC files, and the benefits are clear for all to hear.
“FLAC is as good as it can get for now. I think what it brings is not limited to quality of audio, but the added convenience as well”, says B&W’s Albert Yong. The only drawback is the sheer scarcity of quality recorded music in 24-bit FLAC format, and that’s where Bowers & Wilkins’ Society of Sound comes in.
Meticulous attention to detail across the whole recording process with the latest high resolution digital recording systems, makes for music of unalloyed purity. That’s why we’re so keen for you to experience 24-bit for yourself. Download Portico Quartet’s Ruins in 24-bit stunning quality.
DIGITAL TIMELINE
1841 Augustin-Louis Cauchy first proposed sampling theory.
1928 Harry Nyquist presents sampling theory to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers
1937 Reeves proposed pulse code wave modulation (PCM) as a way of storing audio
1948 John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain’s bipolar junction transistor, which made compact digital circuitry a reality.
1958 C.H. Townes and A.L. Shawlow invented the laser.
1960 I.S. Reed and G. Solomon’s work on error correction codes gave us the technology that would be directly applied to Compact Disc twenty two years later
1967 Japan’s NHK Technical Research Institute publicly demonstrates a digital audio recorder running 12bit resolution and a 30kHz sampling rate.
1969 Physicist Klaas Compaan uses a glass disc to store black and white holographic images using frequency modulation at Philips Laboratories.
1977 Sony, Mitsubishi and Hitachi demonstrate digital audio discs
1980 Sony signs up to Philips ‘Red Book’ laser disc; Compact Disc is born.
1982 Sony and Philips launch first commercial CD players.
1987 Sony launches Digital Audio Tape (DAT) with 16-bit, 48kHz digital PCM system.
1994 MP3 (MPEG 1 Audio Layer 3) finalised. A compressed, lossy 16/44.1 format using approximately 20% of the space of a WAV file, it ushers in online music distribution.
1999 Super Audio Compact Disc (SACD) launched, offering high resolution digital sound using the Direct Stream Digital (DSD) system, with effective 20-bit resolution.
2000 DVD-Audio is launched from the DVD-Forum; offering up to 24-bit, 96kHz resolution from a DVD.
2001 Josh Coulson finalises Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) v1.0.
Resources like the one you mentioned here will be very useful to me! I will post a link to this page on my blog. I am sure my visitors will find that very useful.
Posted: Saturday, 4 September 2010“FLAC is of course a free, open source system like MP3″
There is nothing free nor open source about MP3! There are in fact a huge number of patent and licensing issues with it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3#Licensing_and_patent_issues
Other than this, a very interesting article!
Posted: Wednesday, 22 September 2010FLAC 24 is the way to go but unfortunately I’d love to know why most of the recordings via this site sound so flat!
The only exception is “strangely” the Peter Gabriel Album… Which really sounds great.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the concept of investing in artists but on the B&W site I would have expected top quality for all recordings.
I have downloaded a few tracks from other sites (I won’t mention names) at full 24 bits 96k or 88k and they all sound stunning!
All the LSO recordings are so flat, there is no life in them. I own Berlioz’s symphonie fantastique on CD from the LSO live collection and it sounds far better than the 24 bit recordings available on the site. Why? The venue is the same and I’m guessing the same team was involved in the recording.
I ran the tracks through a spectrum analyser to see if I could spot something dodgy had occured during the convertion to FLAC and I found that all LSO tracks included a 16khz or 21khz spurious signal within the recording. What is this all about? My CD doesn’t show anything similar.
I haven’t downloaded all the tracks but so far I’m nearing MP3 quality on most of them…
On another point, why are the 24 bit flac files sampled at 48k? One more time the LSO files are SACD recording at 88k which isn’t a multiple of 48. There is bound to be some information loss during the convertion!
I’m fortunate to own a very revealing system (I spent tens of thousands of pounds on it) and if something has been badly produced, it will show very quickly. I convert the files back to WAV and burn them on DVDs to play them from a PS audio transport, so no pollution from the PC… The PS audio will play anything up to 24bit 192k.
So unless things improve, audiophiles please look elsewhere. It is sad because there really is some good music available.
Posted: Monday, 27 September 2010Someone help me here. What is the point of all this refinement if it can only be played back on a computer system or hand-held device? Even with the MM1s the result is far from hi-fi. Similar to downloading Avatar to your Blackberry if you ask me. I am a professional classical musician and I agree the LSO sounds like crap on the Sound Society recording. Awful! I have only seen a handful of proper goodies meant to stream audio from a computer file to a proper hi-fi (yes, mine is a good one) but they were so expensive as to not really make sense. Again, what is the point? Someone please put me straight.
Posted: Monday, 25 October 2010As usual there was a lot talk about how to play FLAC in MacOS X and Windows, but no one mentioned anything about GNU/Linux. Maybe it’s not very necessary though, since all distributions that I know of has full FLAC support out of the box.
Posted: Tuesday, 16 November 2010Compression is not an idea it is just technical work around for saving space on disk. Hearing audio from PC is not a solution for audiophile community becouse of technical disadvantages, preferences, custom or individual reasons. In addition typical of shelf audio componente like amplifiers base on obsolette electronic circuits. It cause sound degradation much more audible than noice and dynamic loose in old CD format – only 96dB (Best CD players has no more than 103dB) .
Posted: Monday, 22 November 2010I have a question?
Why don’t you offer 24-bit ALAC. ALAC supports 24-bit recordings, and I’ve made recordings all the way up to 96 Khz. An iPod classic won’t play music over 48 Khz, but you’ve got to admit that 24-bit 48 Khz is pretty good for an iPod.
Whenever I find 24-bit FLACs I have to convert them with xACT (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/xACT-users ) to ALAC to play them on my iPod and iTunes. I’ve never had a problem or a loss (sonically speaking) by converting them using this program, but it would certainly make my life easier if you just offered 24-bit ALAC.
Posted: Monday, 24 January 2011Can I use my Phillips Streamium to listen to 24-bit FLAC?
Posted: Wednesday, 26 January 2011I agree with most of the comments saying that quality of sound is not what we can expect from B&w.
Posted: Thursday, 27 January 2011Except Peter GAbriel.
Have much better result with a top cd player!
In addition sourd Lebel is often too l’os
I suspect that I s hall not pay for another year
Hifi fans will never stop buying cd (SACD, HDCD, AMCD) or vinyl over downloads- it’s the art work, the ‘hunt’ for an obscure album at a record shop. Digital is for iPods, and who need to change or search for a ‘favourite’ song. When wa the last time you’d listen to an album from beginning to end???
Posted: Thursday, 24 February 2011Digital timeline misses out HDCD format from Pacific Microsonics.
Posted: Thursday, 24 February 2011It seems like an awful lot of trouble with buying the DAC and external soundcard for the sake of a rare 24 bit album. I have never really noticed any problems with 16-bit WMA-formatted recordings myself, even 320kbps MP3 usually sounds perfectly fine.
Posted: Thursday, 24 February 2011i do a lot of recording in 24 and 32 bit as i have a DAW using Cubase and Ableton.
the difference i find is the sampling frequency jumping from 44kHz to 96KHz. i normally record in 32bit. its actually not true that studios are recording in 16 bit. protools, logic, cubase etc; these DAWs have been at these higher resolutions for years. mixing engineers have all the files waiting and ready for us out there. on their computers. all they needed was the format standard and its here now with FLAC. the hifi market is now gearing the hardware towards it. there will son be a flood of post 2000 released material when DAWs became very common. the key to FLACs success is faster braodband availability and the publics willingness to buy online.
rubbish about no difference in quality,,,, 24 bit 96kHz has depth in the soundstage like CD would never achieve for all types of music. its amazingly wonderful to hear with correct audio hardware. belive me. i hate having to reduce my recordings down to miserable 16bit444kHz its like flattening the music with a hammer.
Posted: Monday, 7 March 2011for those of you who “do not hear any difference” between lossy and lossless sound file formats I recommend that they listen to “no love” of eminem featuring lil wayne. where is wayne (at the background) in lossy formats; no where, completely lost! personally I am waiting for the days of 24bit FLAC widely used for recordings to come….
Posted: Saturday, 16 April 2011Regarding comments that this is only suitable for a computer / hand held devices. Musical fidelity m1 clic supports playing 24bit 192khz flac.. Simply put the files on a USB hdd/stick and plug it in you can use the same method with the logitech squeezebox touch both not requiring a pc any where near your hifi equipment. Unlike all the other products in the squeezebox range the touch has USB and sdcard support and can be browsed directly on the device.
Posted: Saturday, 18 June 2011When you say “MUSIC” you do not say WHAT music! If it is an italian youngster squeaking w emaciated falsetto some purported “canzone napu…” then 16 bit is ample enen including shrieks from the audience. If it is Great Mass in c of WAM or Wagner or Mahler … Then i suspect evev 24bit is NOT enough. Anyway we have on record one of the top engineers of Deu. Gramoph. Having said that “to catch it ALL we need 28 or 30 bits”. So!
Posted: Sunday, 25 September 2011I can certainly hear the difference very clearly esp. In violin tutti but also in highest registers of the piano which become the same as glass bells or the triangle. That,s why you shoul keep 96 along with 24 and not dwngrade it to 24bit/44kHz. Have you noticed that the Cello always sounds v. Good and the violin rarely ? 44kHz is ample for one and not enoughnfor high notes of the other.
By was of an example of great success I quote the V violin concerto in A by Grumiaux rescussitated by Philips o. 24/96 CD – I wish any violin recorded today on 16/44 would come close to that old recording.
Finally I am sadened to see somuch of MP3 and so little of FLaC.
Yrs. Jan
Why should I buy LSO here, when I can have the SACD and get the closest possible sound to the real thing?
Posted: Tuesday, 27 September 2011Can someone explain me how to play a file downloaded from the Society Of Sound club in my iTunes (ON WINDOWS XP)? I want to play the flac files on my itunes on the ipod to the the Zepplin Air.
Posted: Tuesday, 27 September 2011Thanks
Hi,
FLAC files are not compatible with iTunes however the 16-bit ALAC (Apple lossless) files are fully compatible.
If you are looking to play the 24-bit FLAC files you need to use a different player that is compatible, something like Songbird (getsongbird.com) would work.
I hope this helps,
Posted: Wednesday, 28 September 2011Susanna Grant
Society of Sound
Hi Susanna,
I have recently purchased B&W MM-1 speakers and joined the Society of Sound. Yesterday I downloaded 24-bit FLAC files and played them in Songbird. To me I didn’t notice any difference between 24-bit FLAC and 16-bit ALC sound. I then converted 24-bit FLAC files to 24-bit ALC and played them in iTunes. And again I didn’t notice any difference between 16-bit ALC and 24-bit ALC. I connected my MM-1 through an USB port. Please let me know why I’m not experiencing the pleasure promised in 24-bit music files.
Best regards
Posted: Monday, 10 October 2011Naveen
Dear Naveen,
You won’t hear a difference as the MM-1’s do not support 24bit 96kHz files. For more information on how to best play your 24-bit files we suggest having a look at this post: http://blog.bowers-wilkins.com/music/discussing-formats/how-do-you-play-24-bit-flac-files/
I hope this helps
Kind regards,
Frazer
Posted: Wednesday, 12 October 2011New Media Product Support
I want to play these on my hi-fi system using the DVD-Audio option. What software do I use to write 24 bit FLAC files to a DVD-Audio? And where do I find it?
Posted: Friday, 23 December 2011Hi Dawn,
Posted: Saturday, 24 December 2011I’m using Cirlinca software (http://cirlinca.com/) for years now. Although ;-) / because you have to pay for it, it’s a perfect tool, easy to use and with sufficient functionality.
Please note that flac files will be converted (automatically and w/o quality loss) to wav before being burned to the disc,
Have fun –
Stephan
Indeed I am not thrilled with LSO recordings, but I cat tell for example that Syriana has an excellent soundstage!
Posted: Thursday, 29 December 2011Full digital path down to speakers is the cheapest and extremely effective solution, Squeezbox Touch after November’s upgrade with WD HD, sound extremely realistic from its digital output to Tact 2150 down to my 802s. No attrack correction can give you mathematically correct music as from a HDD.
Flac HD is what I was expecting a whole HIFi life, and after MP3 disaster to music, I try to buy to increase availability even if friends have the file. Fidelio came to HD Tracks, other good ones will come, other Society of Sound will appear, and we wil be at last happy that disc space made for films will be used by us for HD music!
Realistic soundstage can be heard if you do not convert again the pure digital source you now have!
Great ears of the world believe me you have fully realistic source at your cable’s end…
Quote: ‘To understand this more clearly, it’s helpful to imagine taking a digital photo of a squiggly line. The more megapixels the camera that you use has, the higher resolution the snapshot will be and the smoother the squiggle will look. This is the visual equivalent of bit depth.’
No, sorry it’s not. The number of megapixel (spatial resolution) a difital camera has is directly analagous to sample rate for a digitised audio signal (temporal resolution). Bit depth is directly analagous to bit depth, which is is actually the individual sample resolution. Your engineers must understand that!
Mike
Posted: Tuesday, 31 January 2012Reply to Dawn Wyngaard re. burning 24-bit flac DVD-A:
Check out the 24 bit audio FAQ at:: http://24bit.turtleside.com/
It lists around a half-dozen options for creatinging DVD-A and a few for DVD-V discs, including some free programs, as well as answers to some other basic 24-bit questions. I’ve used Lplex with great success for creating DVD-V’s with stunning results, and these can be played on any DVD player…
Spuddy
Posted: Tuesday, 6 March 2012In the article above I read, “If you’re looking to build up a FLAC library of your existing CD collection, then a good starting point for ripping is……”, and wondered if someone could explain to me why a FLAC copy of a 16bit/44.1hertz CD should sound better than the original CD? Am I missing the point, or is it more about making copies for pc/mac playback?
Posted: Friday, 9 March 2012if i buy a halide design hd dac or a cambridge audio dacmagic plus dac and play my stored music (in flac,having ripped my dvdaudio collection to flac via dvdaudioextractor) via mediamonkey or jriver is it really going to sound far superior to listening with just a digital spdif out tomy avreceiver as i do now(my current pc is an ancient hpmediaplayer xp that really has a digital out!) i plan to have made a customized pc music storer with a gigabit ethernet sound card with spdif out and a usb of course and hdmi out does that make the external dacs redundant ot am i going to get goose bumps listening to the deads american beauty,workingmans dead(dvdaudio recordings) the doors the band and dylan and the stones insacd or is it going to be just great but not as good as listening to the originals on a sacd/dvdaudio changer i ues now thanks your thought/comments will be appreciated bobmd
Posted: Friday, 20 April 2012I use mostly 16/44 wav files and some 24/96 and even 24/192 all wav. To me a 16/44 wav sounds better by far than a 24/96 flac. The 24/192 wav files often seem like too much detail and become tiring.
Posted: Thursday, 7 June 2012Using a top quality DAP playing wav files at 24/96 feeding a decent tube amp and full range single driver horns I am in audio heaven. Shame there’re too many crap recordings revealed by this set up.
Very nice article! However, can anyone explain to me, whether FLAC files are decoded on the fly while playback (e.g. in Winamp) or the sound which ultimately reaches the speakers is still compressed? I’m asking this because when I play a FLAC file in Winamp or at my Squeezebox Duet, the info page shows a bit rate in a range of 1000-1500kbit/s, while when playing the same track but decoded before (i.e. in wav), the bitrate is considerably higher (i.e. more than 2000kbit/s). Can’t really understand this, since the FLAC is defined as a lossless format. Does it mean that if I want stream source sound to speakers, I should do it via wav format, while using FLAC for archiving purposes only? Thanks.
Posted: Wednesday, 11 July 2012Hi (unnamed?) Author of this brilliant article,
Posted: Sunday, 26 August 2012what is with streaming 24bit-alac(-converted-flacs) to an zeppelin air? Does this make any sense at all?
Dear Florianinside
Posted: Wednesday, 29 August 2012The Zeppelin Air can support up to 24-bit, 96kHz.
Kind regards
Bowers & Wilkins
Other than being locked into an OS are there any pitfalls to converting to ALAC and streaming via @TV for a optical connection to one’s audio system? I made the FLAC/ALAC choice in 2004 thinking that Apple provided the best solution for me at the time. It is my understanding that if I ever decide to return to FLAC there should be no loss due to file conversion, is that incorrect?
For me the move to lossless was only really constrained by disc space, but disc space has since caught up. My experience is that the biggest barrier is companies like Amazon/iTunes refusing to sell digital music in lossless format. As such I’ve limited my purchases to CD until things change. My other concern is the complete stall by portable music players at 160GB (iPod) as they transfer from spinning disc memory to flash memory. My 3-5 star list in iTunes is over 300 GB and I still can’t take the whole thing with me even though memory has grown substantially.
Once we convince the sales channel to enable their customers we’ll be off to the races. It just seems to me that companies like Apple have an incremental upgrade business model where they upgrade formats incrementally charging customers to upgrade their library with every step.
Not to mention the push for cloud based music libraries. If cloud based systems take enough market share there will be limited push to increase file size as that will equate to a need for increased server capacity and bandwidth.
I’d love to see the industry start treating customers like they aren’t mindless drones willing to pay for what ever they decide to sell us.
Hildy
Posted: Wednesday, 24 October 2012“Theoretically, 24-bit digital has a resolution of 144dB, which is more than enough (130dB is the threshold of pain for the human ear)…”
You’re confusing signal to noise ratio with volume. 24 bits provides a signal to noise ratio of 144dB, which has nothing to do with ear pain, which is a function of volume.
Posted: Wednesday, 24 October 20121. Ripping tracks from standards CDs and then converting them to FLAC is pointless! It is like simple up-sampling 16>24 when really acquired data are 16 bit with all limits of 16 bits format.
Posted: Wednesday, 24 October 2012So we need 24 (or better) originally recorded data/music, then it may be played using FLAC players.
2. Of course ripping CD tracks is OK when one uses something like Exact Audio Copy – it is much better, usues full 16 bit resolution, make all rippingmore comprehensive then simple OS based rippers
3. One of best players is AIMP, forget any Microsoft or Apple solutions.
4. For playing originally 24 bit recorded music use external DAC’s, or optical digital output of your PC.
5. All discussion about human 20Hz – 20kHz hearing range is just stupid. It is Dark Ages method,- human audio perception tested for single sine wave! Each millisecond of music contains frequency spectrum much wider than 100kHz. Use high sampling rate recording system, drop a glass on stone floor and see Fourier spectrum.
Then listen to this sound using 44.1kHz sampling rate and compare it when 192kHz is used. Analogue system had frequency range much wider than 100kHz. It is widely known for audio specialist, nobody knows why still not widely applied. Sorry, I am bored with all of these…. Sorry for mistakes :)
Wonderful article. Puts things in perspective so well. 24bit 96k has always been my favourite audio playback But as stated above its just so limited because of the expense. I hope it will one day become the bench mark for all CDs weeding out 16bit 44.1k. Thanks again B&W!!
Posted: Wednesday, 24 October 2012First, lets stop muddying the water: MP3 for all intents and purposes is free and open. There is nothing even close to as ubiquitous and readily available. Every music player plays it, virtually every audio software package with any credibility will encode it. So let’s stop pretending otherwise. Second, while FLAC may be far superior to MP3, it needs a separate player and encoder that frankly, is a pain in the ass to get. I still, even after reading this article, cannot find a link to any resource that will provide me with a FLAC encoder for my music. For these reasons, FLAC has failed and will continue to. When it has grown up and is included in the major music players like iTunes, winamp and WMP, it will own MP3. But until then, it is just another useless hobby codec.
Posted: Wednesday, 24 October 2012This piece http://www.kenrockwell.com/audio/why-cds-sound-great.htm flat out contradicts some of the claims made for 24-bit and SACD. Not sure who’s right!
Posted: Thursday, 25 October 2012Sorry Kyle, I have to disagree with you here. FLAC may not be as widely adopted as MP3 yet, but wait another 5 or 6 years and I think you’ll change your mind. MP3 became popular because it was the first format that allowed people to listen to and transport music without a physical package. Back in the year 2003, MP3′s allowed me to download and stream music that I previously had no access to.
Broadband is just now reaching speeds that let me download and listen to 40MB FLAC files rather than 4MB MP3 files, and storage is cheap enough to let me take them with me. iTunes doesn’t support FLAC simply because Apple is financially invested in their own proprietary lossless codec (ALAC). Basically all other quality media players support FLAC files. If Apple does begin to support FLAC, it will only be after people start moving away from their software because of it.
It took me all of 30 seconds on google to find a fully functional FLAC encoder for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Seems like you failed here, not FLAC.
Posted: Thursday, 20 December 2012I sincerely hope the engineers at B&W have a better understanding of physics than the folks that wrote this article.
See here for an actual scientific discussion of HD audio: http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
Spoiler alert: it is a mathematical fact that there are no benefits to 24 bit (or higher) depth or 192khz (or higher) sampling rates, and ironically in the case of higher sampling rates there are potential major drawbacks. Any differences you hear are either placebo effects or the result of better mastering often done for HD downloads.
Posted: Friday, 25 January 2013