Audio CDs have less error correction than CD-ROMs. When you rip an audio CD, the drive is doing the error correction, and may give you PCM data different from what was written on it. Software like ExactAudioCopy tries the best it can, but that’s exactly that. Reading CD-ROM data is different. You can get an iso image of a data cd, but not an audio one.
This was done to both increase play time and discourage copying.
So since you’ll never get the raw redbook data off a cd, there is no reason to prefer WAV over FLAC for CD audio.
> This was done to both increase play time and discourage copying.
I doubt copying figured into the decision process (at least not a deliberate "anti-piracy" thought process).
The CD was released in 1982 [1]. This was only one year after IBM had released the original IBM PC, which came with one or two 320KB 5.25 inch floppy drives. The IBM PC did not have an official "hard drive" variant from IBM until the PC XT [3] released in 1983 (one year after the CD) and the hard drive option was a whole 10MB. When the target was replacement of the Vinyl LP player and compact cassette deck, and when their target customer base might have had 10-20MB of total storage in their personal computers (if they even had a personal computer), it would seem unbelievable to Sony and Phillips that those customers might even be capable of copying a disk holding somewhere upwards of 850-950MB of digital audio data.
And of course in the above I am overlooking that in order to "copy a CD" (as in make a digital copy) one first requires a CD drive that can interface with a PC in a digital way, and such drives did not appear until some years after the CD's release.
So with an amount of data on each disk that exceeds end users available storage by orders of magnitude, and no "CD drives interfaced digitally to computers" at the same time it seems unlikely that Sony or Phillips ever even considered that end users would be able to digitally copy CD disks.
I meant versus a raw binary dump of the CD.