Originally Posted by gIzzE
I said this previously, and just decided that maybe using iTunes was not the best as I too hear a difference between WAV and Lossless.

Ripping on MacBook Pro and then playing via an Airport or AppleTV I prefer the AIFF to Lossless, there is a definite smoothness to the AIFF.

I guess I should try another ripper??

What do people suggest for a Mac? What does Sooloos use?

If you do hear a difference with everything done right as Ronnie suggested then you have a bug in the encoder or decoder (highly doubtful).

Also keep in mind all Rippers themselves RIP as PCM than transcode to what ever format you request. Different Rippers may use different encoders and possibly different implementations of encoders.

You don't need subjective hearing tests to prove these lossless encoders work. You can Rip to any format, burn it and rip it again and again and again and you will get the same 1's and 0's. If done properly. There are some complex tricks to get the exact number of lead in samples so that you can diff them byte for byte.

There was an article I read once on how to Rip and Burn a CD, such that the burned CD would pass the accurate Rip checksum. It was not trivial. But that doesn't matter the lossless encoders have been tested to death and if there was a problem with any of them you'd know it.

One way to verify WAV is performing the same is to test with something like a DTS Rip (samples are in the wiki).

The best way to FULLY test your whole work flow it to use a DTS CD (or burn a DTS CD with the samples in wiki must be 16/44 DTS).

Then use the same work flow you would use to Rip that CD as a WAV or a AIFF or Apple Lossless or FLAC.

If they all play then your work flow, encoders and decoders are all work fine and it should sound identical.

Keep in mind these FILE formats. EVERYTHING gets converted to PCM before it's played. Computers don't care what the format is and it's very simple to proove decoding WAV vs Apple Lossless vs FLAC will decode to the same PCM. If trivial lossless compression didn't work 100% we'd be in big trouble in many areas of computer science.

- Fiddler (IMHO)

If you think listening to music is fun, try learning an instrument.
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