Is flac only noticable on DAPs and headphones?

[d_headshot]

I just ripped a track from a cd I had and encoded the wav into flac with this command line in exact audio copy:

-8 -T "artist=%a" -T "album=%g" -T "tracknumber=%n" -T "title=%t" -T "date=%y" %s

8 being the highest quality of compression without regards to the time it takes.

When I played the file on the computer, I didn't notice any differences. Now if I transfer that file to a DAP that supports flac, will I notice a difference with a good pair of headphones?

EAC reads the file as 14.05 MB before compression and the mp3 version of the file is about 13.6 MB at cbr(yes I know about the silliness of cbr but this is for testing) and the flac file is about 44.4 MB. Because the file is so big I'm assuming that all flac versions of a track are big like that(hence the name "lossless").

Because the file is so big, flacs are mostly used for archiving songs, writing them on flac audio cds, etc. right? One last question, for the people who have flac on your portable players, did you get the largest space possible so you can accomidate all your flac files?

[no9]

I just did some testing of my own and to me there wasn't much difference between MP3 256 VBR and Flac full blown sound wise. The Flac did sound better but not enough for me to justify the space that it takes up. I did buy my 16g i7 with the plan of larger bit rate song files, but the sheer size of lossless files made me stick with MP3.

[saratoga]

Originally Posted by d_headshot

When I played the file on the computer, I didn't notice any differences. Now if I transfer that file to a DAP that supports flac, will I notice a difference with a good pair of headphones?

Depends what you're comparing to, but good VBR MP3 is rarely noticeably different then flac.

Originally Posted by d_headshot

EAC reads the file as 14.05 MB before compression and the mp3 version of the file is about 13.6 MB at cbr(yes I know about the silliness of cbr but this is for testing) and the flac file is about 44.4 MB. Because the file is so big I'm assuming that all flac versions of a track are big like that(hence the name "lossless").

You did something wrong. CBR MP3 cannot be encoded at over 1000kbps. The highest allowed is 320kbps for ordinary MP3. Likewise, FLAC will not be larger then the source WAV.