Intrigued by the ripping of CDs to uncompressed Flac, I decided to redownload my Qobuz purchases from the last decade as Wav, and then convert them to uncompressed Flac…quite pleased by how much more ‘natural’ or smooth that they sound.
I ws then starting to think about purchases from other stores, which I download in compressed Flac, and was wondering about the value of uncompressing those too.
Does anyone else do that?
I am interested in doing exactly that.
How do you download in .wav? I couldn’t find a way on the K50- or do you do it on a separate machine?
Have you noticed any change in sound quality? That would be my goal- I think the storage space used is very large 
But hard drives are cheap these days
Qobuz allows you download albums as Wav. files, which I then converted to Uncompressed Flac with the db poweramp converter. Like many things it gives rise to a small improvement.
What I will try next is seeing whether decompressing Flac files from other sources (HiRes Audio; HD Tracks; Universal) to see if there is any value in that,
So far I like the smoothness of the Uncompressed Flac files. We will see.
WAV is uncompressed. Converting it to uncompressed FLAC pretty much just changes the container in which the data is held. The improvements you hear today may vanish at a future time as the playback software evolves. I hope it would as uncompressed formats should sound the same.
I’ll admit I’ve never tried it (& I won’t totally dismiss it without having first done so), but your comments do slightly surprise me. I’ll refer you to a comment from John Atkinson of Stereophile in answer to a question on this subject.
Equivalent but identical
Sorry, I should have made this clearer…(I blame COVID)
I am not saying Uncompressed Flac sounds better than Wav. but better than Flac downloads from Qobuz. (I think) I read that @MarkCole suggested that when ripping CDs, rip to Wav. and then convert to Uncompressed Flac (better for metadata)…so I tried this with Qobuz downloads. I like the small gains in smoothness this led to etc.
Looking at the audio properties of a Flac download from Qobuz, the degree of compression seems to hover around 65%. They sound good, but the Uncompressed Flac sounds a bit better.
I’m assuming that there may be many factors to be considered (I am largely using Roon Server/Squeeze Player on a K50, AES output to a Devialet Expert Pro 250 Amp), and perhaps an alternative server might extinguish the small improvement, but Roon is just so user friendly.
Next step will be to try decompressing an older Flac file, to see if it makes a difference.
Ah ok that makes sense. I always purchase AIFF because it is uncompressed and it has better metadata support than WAV.
Thanks! That’s a great tip, as Qobuz and HD Tracks will allow AIFF downloads.
Seems HiRes Audio is Flac only.
Will try AIFF where I can going forwards.
