is FLAC better than wav?

alright guys. my first post here. i recently talked with a prof of mine who's an audiophile. he asked me a question i couldn't answer. is FLAC better than wav? also he wanted to know i FLAC was ripped at either 19kb or 24 kb? it may not be kb tho...any help is appreciated. thanks.

In terms of audio quality, both FLAC and WAV should be equal as both compress audio in lossless formats. This means that when the file is compressed, no data is discarded to help shrink the file size.

FLAC, is superior in terms of compression, as it compresses more efficiently than WAV. If you want to read more about it, here's a wikipedia article.

Well I already stated my preference ,but to be honest I don't have many .wav files for comparison.

On the other hand, I think that pretty much any media player out there can handle .wav files, while it requires some searching to find one that plays .FLAC files.

If you want to use .ogg or .flac files in Windows Media Player, you can download these codecs. Once installed, you should have no problem playing them at all, and they won't alter anything on your computer or media player. I've been using this for quite some time now.

Direct link to download

All digital studios are recording either in .wav or .aiff, never in .flac! So converting tracks produced in wav, into flac seems quite impossible to sound better. Read me?
It's a different question, when you want to rip a CD or digitalize an LP recorded before the digital era. You won't hear the difference between flac and wav, ...until you're a trained sound engineer and has top-notch studio monitors (STARTS around 2500$ for a pair , or maybe not even then.
The Wave file has several types, differing by resolution. The quality all depends of the Bit depth (in bits) and the Sample rate (in Hz). A CD quality is at a bit depth of 16bit and sample rate at 44100 Hz. That means that the amplitude of the waveform is "pictured" 44100 times per second in a depth of 16bits, that allows 96dB of dynamic range. Imagine a sound wave in a coordinate-system, and then imagine the Sample rate as the X-axis, and the Bit depth as the Y-axis.

In studio they rarely ever use anything higher than 48kHz at 24bit, because human ear just can't hear the difference at all, and it just takes more space on the hard drive. The higher rates has to do something with stretching and modulating the audiofiles, so it doesn't sound totally awful when you stretch the untight Drumtakes or Vocals for example...

Hope it helped something

I have a nice FLAC player running on my Macbook with mountain lion, it's called VOX.

http://voxapp.didgeroo.com/

It has an awesome interface, a cool equalizer with some presets.

I TOTALLY recommend it!

Hope it helps you.

just download foobar2000 like every other music lover. plays everything. can customize it like crazy. supports a bunch of plugins and output stuffs (directsound, wasapi, etc).

makes windows media player and everything else feel retarded.