Why’s FLAC ‘the’ lossless codec? Is it future-proof(able)? Comparisons, [TOS #6: was “Future proof lossless audio/codec” in General Audio] Options

[eahm]

I am trying to understand why is FLAC standardizing in the lossless world? Reading here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of...chnical_details isn't True Audio more future proof? All these channels and huge range, isn't it the "best" option for the next "100 years"?

If one day everyone will start using FLAC, will there be a way to expand the number of channels available? For expample the "new new" 12.1 Surround System or whatever they will come up with.

Just some thoughts, don't want to get anyone upset, I use FLAC and I love it.

Thanks.

This post has been edited by eahm: Jun 23 2012, 18:03

[TBeck]

Earlier in the thread, TBeck warns against that comparison where his codec performed also outperformed FLAC by larger margin than usual, on the grounds of the test corpus which included lossy sources.

Since i have read several reports of commercial CDs containing probably lossy compressed audio, i think it's ok to have a few such files in a larger test corpus, but they should contribute only a bit to the sum results.

Also (and as you implied), there’s little point in making lossless encoding better at representing something that has already been processed by a lossy codec. Transcoding is bad, m’mkay?

I don't think it's totally irrelevant if a codec can compress such files well. Files with very high sampling rates like 192 KHz also "appear" low passed because there is so little natural high frequency content. Accordingly TAK compresses them very well.

This is not always true for files converted from a DSD-source, where the conversion process seems to add a lot of high frequency noise.

[stephan_g]

This is not always true for files converted from a DSD-source, where the conversion process seems to add a lot of high frequency noise.

It's not the decoding - this is inherent to DSD, being a heavily noise-shaped 1-bit format. Results would be expected to vary depending on how fancy the noise shaper was.

How's TAK's handling of 24-bit files? FLAC doesn't compress these too well.