compressed and uncompressed .wav files

Question

What is the difference between compressed and uncompressed .wav files?

Answer 1

You have to be very careful when using the word "uncompressed" when talking about media.

Basically ALL digital media is compressed in some way. Audio, or video. No matter what it is, it is compressed in some way. Its intrinsic to converting from analog to digital.

The problem isn't really technical, its lingual.

People think that uncompressed means "nothing done to it" when in reality there really isnt any way you can do this. There is always some kind of compression done when you convert the analog signal coming out of the mic and going into a file...Its essential.

What uncompressed means is very high quality. And different "Uncompressed" codecs do things differently.

I know more about video codecs, so i will base my example in those.

Black Magic (A company that makes video Out Cards) has an Uncompressed Codec. Its very good. Makes Beautiful images.. But its not really "uncompressed". Sure its big. But compare it to a DPX of TIFF image sequence...and it aint that big, and is quite compressed. Its only 10 bit, but something like an OpenEXR image sequence is like 32 bit...and coming from film, that is still technically compressed. It has to be.

Its just the nature of the beast.