Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Advice from Axiom Owners How to improve my Axiom sound?

In FLAC, the level of compression has very little if any influence on the amount of processing power required for the decompression of the music file. The thought behind FLAC was to develop a compression format that put all the resource requirements into the compression end, but have a very low requirement for the decompression when you listen to the sound file.

You have to remember that FLAC is a lossless compression. Think a ZIP file for music. You get out exactly what you put into it, just in a smaller amount of required space for storage.

By comparison, the lovely MP3, and even Apples M4A are a lossy compression. It gets a much smaller file by removing data from the source during the compression. The thought was that the human ear is not that sensitive and certain sounds can be compressed without making a radical change to the sound you hear. so if removing complexity to the sound can save some space they do it to achieve a bitrate of data in the file. The smaller the bitrate, the more data that is removed from the sound to achieve it.