Youll see that WAV files end up being slightly, insignificantly, smaller.

The digital version of a vinyl is lossless audio, which is typically stored in an large, uncompressed format, Penderworth writes.

These are by no means optimized for playback on all machines, nor are they easy to carry on a mobile devicea single four-minute song can be ten times as large in file size as the same track in MP3 or AAC.

While its true that some people may prefer the sound of vinyl (for reasons that completely elude me), thats not because its a more accurate reproduction.

Lets talk about the gradual degradation of the disk over multiple plays.

The reality for me, though, is that pulling out a disk and sitting down to listen to it in the one place in the house that affords me the pleasure is simply less convenient than using modern digital options, where I can have almost all of my music in my pocket, streamed to various speakers over my own airwaves.

That a group of golden ears claim it is some how better notwithstanding.

The physics of this process just arent as good as the digital audio.

Anyone who has ever cut a record before knows that it is build on so many sonic flaws that theres no way it would some how be more sonically complete or pure than a digital reproduction.

Theres definitely something nostalgic and sweet about playing a record, but its not the best sounding medium.

I just received the new Universal Audio Apollo Twin Thunderbolt IO and it makes these lossless files sound insanely great.

WAV is less efficient because it is redundant (parts of it structure are repeated and no that cant be used for error correction) and it is somewhat inconsistent in that a wav file may or may not be a compressed (lossy) file.

WAV was developed by Microsoft and IBM 1991 while AIFF was developed by Apple 1988.

Theres really no difference in using one versus the other in terms of quality or capability of the file format.

I can understand having a preference, but youd be hard pressed if you have a career in media actually finding that it matters one way or the other.

I usually use AIFF but only because decades ago thats what I started using and it was Apple developed, but other than that, theres no difference.

Its a great format, and if youre looking for lossless audio compression in the Apple ecosystem ALAC is the go-to format.

Theres also FLAC which is more popular out there although its not directly compatible with Apples ecosystem.

Fortunately, the two can be losslessly transcoded either way.

WAV was developed by MS.

Both files are EXACTLY the same size, but WAV has the added capability to handily multiple of channels at once(think 7.1 uncompressed audio files).

So yes it is an older format, but no, its not going anywhere.

WAV isnt a Windows format, it was developed by Microsoft and IBM.

While Microsoft first implemented it with Windows support, it was also immediately picked up across every other platform, including Mac OS.

Different transcoders will result in slight variations based on meta data being added to the file, but try this experiment yourself Use the QuickTime 7 Pro player to export a WAV and AIFF transcode of the same file.

Mac Os X Audiophile Player