Processor power

I wrote an opinion in my post of two-days ago about the idea that it is the processing power requirement of decoding lossless compressed audio that inflicts the sonic "damage" one might hear when playing back FLAC or ALAC. Of course that sparked a great deal of debate on the subject. As I watch the video on the Munich High End Show I posted yesterday, I note my laptop's fan is cranking up on high: video processing being an enormous processor hog, with the video card having to draw each and every pixel 24 times a second. While audio decompression takes nowhere near the processing power of a video, it certainly requires much more than playing a simple WAV or AIFF file. And just like an amp or speaker that's working hard changes its sonic character, so too does a computer decoding and then playing back an audio stream. It costs less than $0.10 per CD to store it on a hard drive in uncompressed form, perhaps $0.50 an album for high resolution files. While not free, it certainly shouldn't break the bank for most people. And at the end of the day, I sleep better knowing my files are as clean and pure as they can be. I am going to adopt a "long term" stance on being anti-compressed when it comes to music storage. I nearly wrote "permanent" for my stance but I know that nothing in our business is permanent. Thankfully.