[roann]

Originally Posted by Mr. Clumpy

If a wave form is not canonical, does that mean it is lossy or just idiosyncratic? I recorded something from a higher quality radio stream and saved it in wav, and while TLH says there are no problems and shows the format as WAV it also shows that it is not canonical.

If a program (e.g. an audio editor) writes additonal information to the file header that does not correspond to the WAVE file specification, the header is called "non-canonical" (a technical description see here). It does not mean the audio data is lossless/lossy. It just a hint that the file header is non-standard in a way.