ROUND 2

Compression Format

FLAC’s lossless compression can be hard to get your head around—how can the file size of music be compressed with no loss of sound quality? Think of it like ZIP compression; squashing office files together reduces their size, but you don’t lose chunks of your PowerPoint presentation at the other end. Obviously, the fact that FLAC is digital means vinyl lovers will growl about the superiority of analog over the grainy waveforms of digital music, but FLAC’s one-to-one replication means dedicated lovers of needles bouncing around in dusty grooves may question their direction.

MP3 and Ogg Vorbis put up a good fight. MP3’s method of perceptual noise shaping (chopping out frequencies your ear can’t hear) can compress audio by around 10–12 times without a noticeable loss in quality—you miss some subtlety, perhaps, but it’s not the swirling mess of compressed WMA. Ogg Vorbis, if anything, does slightly better, using a different psychoacoustic compression method from MP3, and concentrating on quality ratings rather than bitrates, which can make tracks of comparable size sound significantly better.

Winner: Ogg Vorbis