FLAC on Android, Is it worth the trouble to listen to FLAC on a android phone? Options

[bsiffredi]

Hello, everyone

I'm new here, so I'd like to first congratulate everyone that participates in these discussions, because I think it's important stuff.

So, here's the topic:

I have bought my first smartphone recently, it's a Samsung Galaxy Ace running Android 2.3.4 (I guess they call it Gingerbread). I want to use it as a music player, so I'm trying out different players available, like WinAmp and PowerAmp. Until now, I was able to play FLAC files only using PowerAmp.

My question is:

Is Android capable of playing FLAC with real sound accuracy and quality, or is the accuracy and quality in some way reduced through the process of playing it? Have there been any tests to assert this?

[Kohlrabi]

Audio quality not so much depends on the OS (Android) as it depends on the components of your phone and the software player itself. I found one review about the Galaxy Ace where frequency response and noise among other things are investigated. I didn't find any more exhaustive review or comparison, sadly.

The question I would ask is whether you really need FLAC on your mobile phone. In my experience I hardly am in situations where I would spot artifacts due to lossy compression (MP3/Vorbis) when I'm listening to music on my phone, e.g. while being on the bus/train and so on. Also FLACs would take up a lot more of the few gigabytes I have on my Galaxy I9000. I also experienced that more often than not for mobile devices the output quality of the device and/or headphones are far more dominant for the perceived audio quality than the compression method used.

I'd suggest you to conduct a blind test of your favourite lossy codec vs. your lossless files on PC-grade hardware and headphones. You might be surprised how well lossy encodings can stand against lossless encodings in an objective test. If you then find a encoder setting which is transparent for your files, the lossy version might very well be good enough for playback on your phone, and you save some space.