What is OPUS?
Opus is the best-sounding lossy codec at low bitrates by a comfortable margin, which is why it carries the audio in nearly every voice and video call you make. It is royalty-free, it handles speech and music equally well, and it is usually wrapped in an Ogg container.
What is WAV?
WAV is raw PCM audio with a small header - uncompressed, unprocessed and enormous, at roughly ten megabytes a minute for CD-quality stereo. It is the working format of audio editing, sampling and speech tooling, where every stage wants the samples themselves rather than a codec's approximation.