[kazinator]

Paul McGowan makes bullshit:

"Four models. One topology — designed by Darren Myers, engineered by Bob Stadtherr. Driven from a state-of-the-art active power supply that delivers performance benefits no traditional transformer-based passive supply can match. Class A bias of 50 watts means your music spends 99% of its time in the most linear region of the amplifier's operation"

Yikes; run the other way ...

[djkoolaide]

On his YouTube channel he claimed that FLAC is different from WAV[1]. No need for any of that in my subscriptions anymore.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QNXQ0KOWyc

[kazinator]

No; he clearly acknowledges that FLAC is lossless, so the audio is bit for bit identical to the original waveform.

The claim is that FLAC decoding digital hardware performs processing which causes noise ("computer hash") if it is not isolated from the audio paths. He gives an example of some hardware where isolation eliminates the problem, supposedly.

I'm skeptical of the claim. Not in the sense whatsoever that I suspect it being false (I don't), but in the sense that the same noisy hardware would produce some "computer hash" even if it were processing uncompressed waveform data. I don't know anything about FLAC, but cursory searches suggest that decoding it is very lightweight. Whether processing raw PCM samples, or decoding FLAC, the hardware would mostly be idle in between producing audio frames (unless it is an embedded processor that is very low in terms of computational power?)

Anyway, he's not simply an crackpot claiming that FLAC quality is inherently different from WAV.

[account42]

A decade ago I had a portable "MP3 player" that supported FLAC. The processing required to decode it is not that significant.

[rcxdude]

Given a sufficiently crappy hardware setup that the CPU activity is injecting noise into the audio path, then in principle the FLAC decoding could be more inconsistent in that regard, because the processing is much more data-dependent with FLAC. But even with WAV your CPU activity is not going to be completely regular, so this still stretching credibility as something you should actually care about instead of just fixing the underlying problem, which should only be a problem on utterly bargain basement non-audiophile/fool setups anyway.