WAV short for WAVeform audio format, is a Microsoft and IBM standard for encoding audio on a PC. It is a variant of the AIFF bitstream format that acts as a wrapper for many audio compression codecs. This explains why the "WAV" format on Macintosh systems is called AIFF. It is the main format used on Windows-based system for raw audio.
WAV is a raw (and therefore lossless) format since it uses an uncompressed storage method, which keeps all the samples of an audio track. Therefore professional users or audio experts use the WAV format for best quality audio.
But since the Internet has become popular, fewer people use the WAV format to transfer audio files, because WAV files are quite large. People more frequently use some compressed but lossy[?] format, such as MP3 or Ogg, to transfer audio, thus achieving a faster file transfer rate over the Internet.
wikipedia.org dumped 2003-03-17 with terodump