WAV, MP3, FLAC and AAC Compared: A 60-Second Round-Trip Test of Audio Quality Loss

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A client asked for a 90 MB WAV demo to be shrunk, prompting an experiment with a synthesized 60-second 48 kHz, 16-bit stereo reference track. The track was converted across several formats using ffmpeg 8.0 and decoded back to measure file size and signal-to-noise ratio against the original. Results showed FLAC preserved the audio bit-exactly at about 31% of the WAV size, while lossy MP3 and AAC files were far smaller but lost fidelity. Re-encoding lossy files compounded the losses, with a two-step chain scoring 6.4 dB lower than a single encode. The author recommends FLAC for archiving and MP3 320k or AAC 256k for sharing, and advises against lossy-to-lossless upgrades or lossy-to-lossy chains.

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