Hi Gordon. I agree with most of that. My unscientific experience with Flac makes me suspect that decoding Flac is faster than uncompressing WMA.

However, PG music chose the highest compression setting for Flac to shrink the files, so decoding on our end takes the longest for the choices of Flac.

And you’re right: adding in the read time and considering the type of drive is important. I think I read that the audiophile drive from PG Music is an SSD. You could be correct especially if using a spinner drive; reading the smaller size WMA files on a spinner drive might indeed be faster than reading Flac files (larger than WMA, smaller than WAV).

It’s all a good question.

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