Can anyone tell any cellphone or mp3 players that plays wav or FLAC formats?

[machoman]

Hi,
I have certain some meditation tracks that needs to be played in lossless formats.I ripped those tracks from CD's and to be played in cellphone or flash mp3 players other than i pods. Can anyone tell me any suggestions for cellphones or mp3players that can play wav or FLAC?

[JimOfferman]

The iPhone plays WAVs, as do all iPods. My guess is that most Windows Mobile phones will too.

But I don't think it matters: 320 kps MP3 are virtually indistinguishable from CD quality when played back over high end studio monitors (there have been many blind tests to confirm this). There's no way that you are going to notice the difference between the two on a portable device. It's technically impossible, really. The DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) and headphones will do much more to "hurt" the quality of the audio than the MP3 compression ever would (let's not even begin to mention playback over the phone's speaker...).

[machoman]

Originally Posted by JimOfferman

The iPhone plays WAVs, as do all iPods. My guess is that most Windows Mobile phones will too.

But I don't think it matters: 320 kps MP3 are virtually indistinguishable from CD quality when played back over high end studio monitors (there have been many blind tests to confirm this). There's no way that you are going to notice the difference between the two on a portable device. It's technically impossible, really. The DAC (Digital to Analog Converter) and headphones will do much more to "hurt" the quality of the audio than the MP3 compression ever would (let's not even begin to mention playback over the phone's speaker...).

Hi jim, thanks for your suggestion. But it is really important to listen to these CD's without any loss in quality when using these products( I use a binaural beat recording called " The world's first digital drug",which is not a drug literally but helps to change the state of mind).

[Minsc]

The Sansa Clip can play WAV and I think there's a FLAC feature planned which you'll be able to download. (Sandisk added OGG support and other features to it already so you can trust them to release more)

One of its features when it was released was the sound quality. According to Cnet it has a 92dB SNR: SanDisk Sansa Clip Review - MP3 Players

Sandisk will announce things like firmware updates in the forums: Sansa Clip - Welcome to SanDisk's Sansa Community

You could also use Rockbox with one of its supported players but I haven't tried it: Rockbox - Open Source Jukebox Firmware
It can play FLAC according to the docs.

[JimOfferman]

Originally Posted by machoman

Hi jim, thanks for your suggestion. But it is really important to listen to these CD's without any loss in quality when using these products( I use a binaural beat recording called " The world's first digital drug",which is not a drug literally but helps to change the state of mind).

And I am telling you that there is no such thing as no loss in quality when you play back WAVs on a portable device. Both the built in speaker and earbuds (even the good ones) are physically incapable of producing the full range of frequencies of the source audio. At best, they approximate what the source sounds like with a bunch of trickery that fools you into thinking you are hearing the full sound. But the cold hard truth still remains: you are not!

So, either these things aren't as fidgety as you claim, in which case they will work both as 320K MP3 or WAV (again, to the human ear these two are virtually indistinguishable) on your cell phone or they are one heck of a placebo.

If pristine audio quality really is an issue with these things, I wonder how the manufacturers of those CDs managed to circumvent the 10% (!) error rate typical on audio CDs. Yes, that's right, according to my manufacturer around 10% of the data on a commercially produced red book audio CD is just plain wrong!

[JimOfferman]

One more thing: if the Wikipedia page for binaural beats can use OGG vorbis files for their example beats, then MP3 will do just fine (be sure to tell your compressor not to cut of frequencies below 20 Hz).