We knew audiophiles were passionate and detail-oriented. And we were not surprised that many of them weighed in double forte on our story last week on sound quality and digital formats.

The main message from nearly all of them: We’re glad someone’s paying attention.

"Nice to see the grievances of audio dorks like me getting public exposure," wrote Ethan Cheng, of Chicago.

"Thank you for the article on digital music formats," wrote Sam Grubb, of Salem, Ore. "I have resisted all the iPod type devices exactly because I have not been willing to sacrifice sound quality."

Then we got an earful on some arcane but important points. Following are excerpts from several astute e-mailers regarding, in particular, our misclassification of the WAV format – and touching on some other issues. We value the clarifications and appreciate that they took the time to write, and then helped us get in tune.

While the WAV format is lossless, it is not a compressed format. That is the key distinction between it and other lossless formats such as FLAC. Josh Burnett Natick, Mass.

I enjoyed your interesting article on music download quality. Overall it was accurate, but the sentence “The array of audio file formats includes Apple’s AAC and Dolby’s AC3, as well as WMA, OGG, FLAC, AVI, and others.” was a little wrong. AVI is a container format normally used for video – it can hold audio encoded in lots of formats (AC3, MP2, MP3, M4A, etc). Also FLAC is a lossless codec – it gives the full CD-quality audio. David Batley Exeter, Britain

A WAV pulled from a CD is not a bit-perfect copy of the master tape [as stated by one of your sources]. A master tape – the large reel of magnetic audio tape that was created in the original studio mix session and subsequently thrown in a vault – contains far more information and “richness” than the CD format can store. Even modern digital recordings, which result in digital files rather than master tapes, are almost always recorded in higher quality than what ends up on a CD. CD audio is 16-bit, 44.1KHz PCM, which is actually a big compromise in and of itself. (For comparison, the DVD-Audio format has up to 24-bit, 192KHz PCM.) The fact that the phrase “CD quality” has become synonymous with “perfect sound” is an enormous fallacy that causes people like me lots of grief. Ethan Cheng Chicago

If you’d like to advance the discussion even further, write to us at Weekend Zone.

by Clayton Collins