Originally Posted by Steve Eyles
Battery life was my main concern, smaller files make for more life.

IIRC FLAC is more computationally efficient to decode than MP3, so there is actually a small power saving there. In hard drive based players this is dwarfed by having to spin up the hard drive more often to fill the (fixed-length*) buffers, however in flash-based players I'm not so sure...

*32MB in my iRiver portable player. Not sure about iPods but I'm guessing around 16-32MB also.


Incidentally, I went to a talk given by Tony Andrews from Funktion One at PLASA yesterday and whilst his technical knowledge in the digital domain was a little lacking, the message he was trying to get across was clear: there is no place for lossy audio formats in the professional music industry.
I think (sincerely hope!) that we're all in agreement that this also holds true for critical listening situations in the consumer audio environment, and I feel that unless we are listening in a noisy environment where the signal to noise ratio encroaches on the dynamic range of the source material (in-ear-monitors such as the Shure SE530's help significantly to reduce this problem), there is no reason nowadays why we can't enjoy full-fat lossless audio goodness through a high quality set of speakers/headphones wherever we are (driving generally excepted, unless you have a new McLaren wink ).

Last edited by t42; 2009-09-14 12:32.