I have done more than 10 audio shows where we bootcamped and showed that both with FLAC/ALAC and AIFF/WAV that flat PCM files (AIFF/WAV) always sounded better.

So I setup a test as follows:

MacBook Pro (bootcamp Win764ULT) <==USB={USB Analyzer}==>DAC/Conveter-->Prism dScope III.

Then hanging onto to the DAC was my TEK Scope which can decode I2S and my Wavecrest DTS and a Standford 760 FFT analyzer which I use to test power supplies as it is capable of full range 1nV readings.

So in this test I compared software programs which were bit true and sound different and also some USB cables which sound different and of course file types which sound different. I have like 200 hours in testing.... so far I can't see any difference.

YET!!!!! 82% of the time people picked the Flat PCM file over the lossless.

John Atkinson and Charlie Hansen both said that I could have spent that time designing something cool. So for now that is what I am going to do!

USB Cables was kind of interesting as I did find some cases were the cables caused data errors and excess jitter on the USB side. While this does not have anything to do with Audio related Jitter errors it did seem to effect the data stream. Especially with Async feedback pipe and the host missing some of these which caused buffering errors.

Thanks
Gordon
J. Gordon Rankin