I could not find this anywhere else. So, here goes: I had burned an Audio CD (cd-r) using FLAC source files. Since that time, I lost the original FLAC files. My question is: If I rip the Audio CD originally made from FLAC files back to FLAC again, do I lose any quality? Thanks!
No, not really. There might be unnoticeable traces of loss depending on your ripper. EAC and better yet dbPowerAmp produce very precise replicas. People get overly caught up in 'no loss'. The reality is, lossless to lossless conversions are always near perfect. Even if you do it badly, you would have to repete the process thousands maybe tens of thousands of times before the changes get bad enough for you to hear. Our hearing is not very precise. Where you can see conversion changes is with low bit rates like commercial lossy audio @128. When the audio is of marginal quality to the human ear you can easily hear any loss. Even with great lossy audios the quality is light years beyond what you can hear. Tiny losses can't be noticed by the human ear. What I forgot to say is your copy with a so-so ripper will be probably at least as accurate as playing the original CD. Optical reads are usually flawed. High-end rippers have various strategies to insure an accurate read such as reading the same sector 10 times and more if there is a variance. CD players "don't care". CDA format dedicates a large portion of the data as error correcting information. If the read is not correct a close facsimile is created on the fly. Assume what you hear playing a CD is not accurate at all. Your hearing is not accurate enough to tell the difference. It is akin to looking at a photo with microscopic flaws. The flaws are too small to see with the naked eye. The top sticky in the other AD audio forum has a link to a video article on this. Wave files are provided so you can play them yourself on any playback device you want. I will add a post how to create a perfect audio copy of a CD. There is a tool that will allow you to make an exact copy of an audio CD. dbPowerAmp can rip the error correction info from the CD as well as the audio.
