Is CD higher/lower/the same quality as FLAC

JDXAV

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I can't remember, is CD music compressed and if so is it lossless? If I rip a CD to FLAC, how would this compare to buying and downloading a FLAC version digitally?
 
Cds are uncompressed and Flac is lossless. It basically repackages the data more efficiently than cd rather than applying any form of signal compression like mp3.

A ripped Flac should sound the same as a downloaded one, assuming the source audio was the same and didn't come from a higher resolution master.
 
As already said both a CD and a FLAC file are both uncompressed. A FLAC ripped from CD will have exactly the same quality.

A CD is 16bit audio at a sampling frequency of 44.1 kHz but a FLAC could potentially be higher rates and frequency so you can get FLACS that are "better" than CD if they're sourced from somewhere other than a CD.

For example I've got some 24bit 96khz FLAC files (mainly Pink Floyd albums sourced from SACD) which do sound better than my CD rips, although wether that's anything to do with the higher frequency and bit rate is debatable, I personally think the original master makes more difference as my SACD rips still sound better when for converted to 16/44.1 FLAC
 
MP3 uses Fourier transforms - effectively resamples the waveforms, then does some maths with them and (depending on the compression/"quality" settings) optionally discards some of the "detail." In much the same way that JPEG does for images.

FLAC uses a form of bitwise compression (IIRC it's a variant of Huffman type compression) like PKZip (or PNG graphics.) When the data is recovered from FLAC, you get back bit-for-bit exactly what went in, thus it's "lossless."

Consequently the file size reduction for FLAC is less than MP3 et al is capable of.
 
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Great, thanks all :)
 

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