Considering a switch to FLAC for mobile listening

2019-05-27 20:49:34

I have a very large collection of FLAC files (~30,000) that I host on a NAS and stream to many clients (ex. Squeezebox, Plex, JRiver Media Center) at home. Currently, I do bulk transcodes to AAC at highest quality to use on my phone. I'm considering a new phone, likely a Samsung S10+, and new 512GB SD card meaning that I could store all the FLAC files on the phone. The Canadian spec S10+ uses the Qualcomm Snapdragon 855 system on a chip.

I would appreciate opinions on the following:
1) Will FLAC consume considerably more battery than high bitrate AAC when using wired headphones? Based on the research I've done to date, it sounds like FLAC will use similar to less battery than AAC. Does that sound correct? I'm unsure if the S10+, or any phones, decode FLAC in hardware or via software
2) I expect FLAC files to transcode when connected to Bluetooth headphones. Should I expect that transcoding to exact a higher battery life penalty from FLAC source files than it would from AAC source files? My Sennheiser headphones support APT-X. My Jabra's support AAC wireless. My Samsung earbuds support Samsung's propriety flexible codec

Re: Considering a switch to FLAC for mobile listening

Reply #1 – 2019-05-28 11:36:25

If this was 2004 maybe there would have been a difference, IMO and especially for the S10, ZERO impact. You can try a few albums to see..

Re: Considering a switch to FLAC for mobile listening

Reply #2 – 2019-05-28 14:26:11

imho, here question in redundancy use of lossless on mobile devises.

Re: Considering a switch to FLAC for mobile listening

Reply #3 – 2019-05-28 18:56:14

2) there shouldn't be any difference for the encoding part because transcoding always happens, even if your songs are in one of supported formats
1) decoding of both of these should be cheap enough to make the difference too small to be relevant
so, overall, this probably won't save you any battery that's possible to measure - the difference, if any, is gonna be impractical to find given practical (in)accuracy of battery life measurement