Sunday May 12, 2005

Dear Visitor:

So, the other day I was in the doctor's office. I had to wait a while and read an article in the October 2004 issue of DIGITAL-WORLD. I am far from impressed. In the sub-article at the bottom of one page. It had these average music listeners and these "golden-eared engineers" compare mp3, AAC, and FLAC. It was obvious that these golden-eared people were stuck up snobs with no brains, or else that the test was flawed. You see, at least one of them thought that FLAC was only good enough to be listened to in the car, where road noise would overpower the noise of the format. Bull!

You see, FLAC is a lossless encoded (compressed) format. When you uncompress it it because an EXACT bit-by-bit copy of the original. So, if you can hear a difference between FLAC and a CD there are three things that have happened. 1) You are a stinking liar who is inventing things or your ears aren't as golden as you thought! 2) The copy was messed with before compressed with FLAC, therefore, the noise isn't the fault of FLAC. or, finally; 3) The CD was played with a high quality player and the FLAC was played through a computer sound card.

So, to do this test properly, there are a few things you have to do. First, you "rip" the CD. Second, you encode it into your file formats WAV (standard, uncompressed), FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Coding), MP3, AAC, etc. Then you convert these back into standard WAV files and burn them back to a disk. This ensures that all formats are compared using the exact same D/A and amplification processes.

So, all in all, I would have to say that #1 and/or #3 in the second to last paragraph are true. Also, I would bet the test was flawed and didn't follow the controls mentioned in the last paragraph. All in all, I was very unimpressed with the magazine. On the same page, in the main article it says that FLAC is lossless, but does loose some quality compared to the original CD. They obviously don't know that an exact binary copy is the EXACT same thing.

People, cancel your subscriptions to this magazine, DIGITAL-WORLD. They obviously don't know how to run tests, they know nothing about digital copies, and the magazine was largely fluff anyway. I am sorry to say this is what I would expect from the publishers of PC Magazine (which is who publishes this magazine). Save your money, talk to your local tech/geek/nerd instead.

Sincerely, Trever Adams