Car Audio Headunit Efficiency: FLAC or WAV

[ThatM1key]

To start off, my question is different from the "FLAC vs WAV" results you find on Google and I couldn't find my answer on there. I understand that WAV and FLAC are losslessly the same. I wanted to know when it comes to car audio head units, which format the radio would like better (efficiency). I mean does modern radios even have enough CPU power to decode FLAC (of any level). All companies claim that there radios can do FLAC support but at what level 1 to 8? or at all since these modern radios have slow interfaces. Maybe I'm overthinking things.

FLAC: Smaller space but requires more brains to decode.
WAV: Larger space and already decoded but could be limited by the FAT32 USB 2.0 limitations on modern radios.

 

[Joachim Herbert]

Maybe I'm overthinking things.

Yes, indeed.

 

[Talisman]

The background noise level in a car is so loud that I doubt you can hear the difference between a flac and a 128kb/s mp3 in that context.
put mp3 at 320 for safety and go serene. There's really no point getting into a lot of trouble with that usage scenario

 

[ThatM1key]

The background noise level in a car is so loud that I doubt you can hear the difference between a flac and a 128kb/s mp3 in that context.
put mp3 at 320 for safety and go serene. There's really no point getting into a lot of trouble with that usage scenario

The noise level isn't bad at all in my car. With my old OEM radio with regular CDs, it sounded a lot better than my new JVC using 320kb/s MP3 CDs. Even when I used a CD with my JVC, The sound quality was still worse. The car came with 8 speakers but I'm using the fronts because of the weird sub setup (This was even before the JVC swap).

 

[Joachim Herbert]

So maybe it's the "JVC".

 

[Talisman]

The noise level isn't bad at all in my car. With my old OEM radio with regular CDs, it sounded a lot better than my new JVC using 320kb/s MP3 CDs. Even when I used a CD with my JVC, The sound quality was still worse. The car came with 8 speakers but I'm using the fronts because of the weird sub setup (This was even before the JVC swap).

Many in here would tell you that they have serious difficulty recognizing an MP3 from a CD in their home audio systems calibrated and listened to in a quiet environment.
If you hear by ear a big difference between CD and CD mp3 320kb/s with two different radios in your car then the problem is not the file format but the quality of the radio

 

[delta76]

Car audio is never meant for critical listening. Yes you are overthinking

 

[ThatM1key]

So maybe it's the "JVC".

Its a cheap JVC from the 2000s. I only wanted it installed for the MP3 CDs ability and the HD Radio.

Many in here would tell you that they have serious difficulty recognizing an MP3 from a CD in their home audio systems calibrated and listened to in a quiet environment.
If you hear by ear a big difference between CD and CD mp3 320kb/s with two different radios in your car then the problem is not the file format but the quality of the radio

Thats not what I mean per se. I'm plan on getting a Kenwood DPX395MBT in the future and so that's why I asked the question. I liked the sound of my older OEM radio but I don't want to carry around 20 CDs like I used to and I also miss my steering wheel controls.

Car audio is never meant for critical listening. Yes you are overthinking

True but I want to achieve almost CD quality. With car audio, its either its sounds great or its sound really bad. I wish the car audio was the home audio market, you know.

 

[Joachim Herbert]

Decoding puts minimal load on a processor. It's encoding that needs power. So just don't worry

 

[delta76]

Its a cheap JVC from the 2000s. I only wanted it installed for the MP3 CDs ability and the HD Radio.


Thats not what I mean per se. I'm plan on getting a Kenwood DPX395MBT in the future and so that's why I asked the question. I liked the sound of my older OEM radio but I don't want to carry around 20 CDs like I used to and I also miss my steering wheel controls.


True but I want to achieve almost CD quality. With car audio, its either its sounds great or its sound really bad. I wish the car audio was the home audio market, you know.

Absolutely. Everyone should be able to listen to good music, car or home. But if you really want to improve your experience, you might want to improve the car audio system. Flac, wav, mp3 will have very little audible difference, if at all.

Even trained professionals struggle at identifying between 320kbps mp3 and flac in a proper critical listening setup. I double that you will be able to hear the difference in a car

 

[AnalogSteph]

In terms of pure processing power required for decoding, FLAC at any setting is much lighter than even 128 kbit MP3. Not as lightweight as plain WAV, but still nothing resembling a challenge even by 2000s standards. Looks like you need about 20-25 MHz worth of Intel Pentium, even less with the highly optimized Rockbox decoder on ARM. (On older machines, I would not be surprised to see some variability depending on whether L2 cache is fitted and whatnot.)

Page Redirection

Note that power usage in portable players may be a different story, as it turns out that reading from SD storage takes up a fair bit of power by tiny DAP standards, and larger files mean that storage is active for longer.

 

[Joachim Herbert]

Some factual information may be found here, namely the following by by NwAvGuy:

On my PC, using Sysinternals Process Explorer (the benchmark tool for CPU usage analysis), playing a WAV file in Foobar required a scant 0.327 seconds of total CPU time from a single core of my multicore processor. This works out to about 0.2% CPU usage. Playing the exact same file in FLAC format, required 0.312 seconds of total CPU time—also about 0.2% CPU usage. These numbers are essentially the same, and the FLAC number is even slightly lower. Why? It’s likely because the CPU has to read half as much data with FLAC compared to WAV. But these numbers are so small, they really don’t matter. Other background tasks in the operating system consume far more CPU than FLAC decoding. So this alone should put the myth to rest.