Has anyone ever done any testing as to which file types load faster on Denon units?
Or seen any discussions which mention it ? Some music sites offer any format for no extra cost and trying to decide why I wouldn’t go with FLAC over WAV or AIFF ?
I use all 3 and never saw a difference in the speed of loading. All of my music comes from an internal SSD.
Album art size effects loading times, make sure you’re no larger than 600x600.
I only use flac, wav and aiffs (don’t have mp3’s) and all load at the same perceived ‘speed’ . You won’t notice any difference.
In controlled benchmarks, starting/loading a WAV file consumes 0.327 seconds of CPU time, while the identical content in FLAC consumes 0.312 seconds. Depending on how fast your storage is (new SSD, old SSD, USB, sdcard etc.) the smaller load-time for the smaller size FLAC makes sense. If you start straight from a slow sdcard, the flac will load faster than the wav, if you load from a new generation SSD, the load-times will be near identical. So, in short: Go with flac, the size gain makes it worthwhile.