Portable CD players are back and now work with wireless headphones

kobuz baby

wav is uncompressed PCM usually, flac is compressed and as such smaller (difference in size depending on the kind of music), but they're both lossless with the resulting signal being bit for bit identical to the data on the CD.

320 kbps MP3 makes little sense nowadays except for when you need maximum quality for a device supporting nothing else. For long term storage, use flac.

It is my understanding that FLAC is effectively a zipped WAV file. Same audio but with lossless compression.

Is flac even necessary if they are coming off CDs? A CD is most often 192kbps mp3 format.

This is not correct, with the caveat that you can burn a 192kbps mp3 file onto a CD-R if you want, I've done it a lot in my younger days.

When you buy an album on CD from the store, that disc will almost certainly have a mark on the label that says Compact Disc Digital Audio. Which means it conforms to the so-called "Red Book" standard which defines its own data format, which consists of uncompressed, 2-channel, PCM audio sampled at 44,100Hz. This works out to be 1,411kbps. WAV files are much more similar to CD digital audio than mp3 files are, and a 16-bit 44,100 Hz WAV file has basically identical sound quality to a CD.

mp3 uses a lossy compression algorithm that allows an mp3 file to be a tenth the size of a CD-quality WAV file at the expense of audio quality. With more modern encoders and selecting a higher bitrate like 320kbps or so you can get pretty good mp3 files but they will not match a CD. There were some cd ripping software packages that would describe 192 or even 128kbps mp3 files as "CD quality" which is demonstrably incorrect but probably the source of this misconception. If you were to repeatedly rip CD audio to mp3, then burn an audio CD from that mp3, then rip the copied disc to mp3, the audio quality would degrade with each iteration.

FLAC uses a lossless compression algorithm and can achieve similar results to ripping a CD to WAV format, but at smaller file sizes than WAV. it won't be as small as an mp3 but it won't suffer from audible compression artifacts. Rip a CD to FLAC format, then burn a new CD from that FLAC recording, and it might not result in a bitwise identical CD because I bet the gaps between tracks wouldn't be perfect but take any random 10 seconds from a track and they should be identical. Repeatedly rip to FLAC and burn to disc and the audio quality won't degrade.

It's theoretically possible to encode higher quality audio than that but you start hitting the limits of human hearing at that point. Also CD audio is strictly stereo; the earliest versions of the standard briefly mentioned quadraphonic audio but this never made it to production, and it can't even do mono. CDs with monaural audio on them are stereo with identical left and right tracks. I personally wish they had included a mono mode in the red book standard so you could have audio books with 2.5 hours on a single disc, but that's what I get for wishing I think. Whatever we have downloadable files now.

But to answer your actual question,* FLAC isn't necessary. mp3 files are capable of sounding pretty good at smaller file sizes than FLAC. Because the devices I own that I use to listen to music all have 256GB of file storage or greater, I am personally not as concerned about file size as I used to be so when I do buy CDs I rip them to FLAC and listen to them in that format, and the audio quality is better than the 128kbps mp3s I was perfectly happy with as a teenager.

With current technology you could make them a lot better. Basically put 700mb of flash memory on the player and rip the whole thing as soon as you put the CD in, then play from flash. But then you get back to why you would want to do something like that again.

Heck yeah!

I had a Sony atrak 3+ player back in the day (around 2003-4, probably, because I used it at work) which was just an mp3 file compression alternative served up on a special cd player instead of an mp3 player… they tried.. anyway I had a re-writable disc that I’d add stuff to whenever I downloaded it, and I think the one cd had like 1800 songs on it or so (and lots of space left)

That didn’t skip, even working a physical job, unless I banged it against something. Part of why I got it. But when I put regular discs in, they would skip a lot if I didn’t have it laying flat.

Bingo

What would a balanced output do for the 3 feet of cable that will most likely be connected to it? I mean sure, put it in if you can't help it, but even though it's a portable player, no one is gonna take that to the next motor fab where it would benefit from a balanced output, and at home an audiophile most likely already has a better player around.

And yes you're right - the whole idea is nonsense to begin with. CDs have always been fully digital, so better listening options exist.