Audio quality and battery life?

[Marvin the Martian]

Originally Posted by Jab

actually FLAC is more efficiently decoded and should be easier on the battery than MP3 files.

That varies from player to player. On a Sansa Fuze or CLip, the battery life is decreased by nearly 50% using level 5 FLAC compared to midrate mp3.

[CrowdAds]

[bonapardo]

Been reading a bit more on FLAC levels and it seems I may have been wrong about decompression. Apparently, differences in processing required between levels should be negligible - it's simply the compression which takes longer. This is a little confusing as I've definitely had firmware incompatibilities with higher FLAC levels in the past which seems to indicate there certainly is some kind of difference in decoding the FLAC levels, but it may be that differences in processing power required are negligible even though the decoding itself may vary..?

[Angry Machine]

Flac are bigger files with high lossless compression, so the DAC has a lot of work to decode it !

Mp3 is pretty easy to decode, and the lower is the bitrate the greater is the battery life.

JetEffects are needing a lot of power, as high impedance headphones like UM3X.

So I think your battery life is very normal.

[steagle]

yeah i tend to agree that FLAC takes more processing power, if for nothing more than it's larger footprint on the drive. MP3's are simple to decode that's why 99% of portable players rely primarily on the MP3 codec (well, and the universal popularity of MP3 too of course). only a few brave companies are offering FLAC decoding and they tend to be on beefier players that can handle it.

[dfkt]

Au contraire, FLAC is extremely efficient to decode, one of the least power-hungry codecs available. It's just a matter of proper implementation. Sandisk, for example, are doing it very wrong. Cowon not so much, but it can always be improved.

http://www.anythingbutipod.com/forum...37&postcount=8