Urgent.News

What's breaking now, across thousands of outlets.

More in Tech

WAV vs MP3 vs FLAC vs AAC: I Round-Tripped 60 Seconds of Audio and Measured the Damage

A client sent me a 90 MB WAV demo last month and asked me to "shrink it but keep the quality." Which is the audio equivalent of "make it pop" — everyone nods, nobody knows which knob to turn. MP3?

  • WAV file provided for size reduction without quality loss
  • Lossy conversion showed AAC at 128k matched MP3 at 192k in fidelity
  • FLAC lossless compression achieved 3.6 MB file, 31% of original size

More from Tuesday 10 November →