DrBenway
Headphoneus Supremus
- Joined
- Jan 30, 2007
- Posts
- 2,122
- Likes
- 15
Quote:
What these threads (all 10,000 of them) always miss is this: it doesn't matter at all whether it's easy or hard to tell the difference. It doesn't matter whether the difference is highly significant or not significant at all. Lossy encoding CANNOT POSSIBLY improve sound. Best case, it offers now-irrelevant advantages of space and bandwidth savings, and leaves the music intact. So, at best it gives you something you don't need and doesn't steal anything from you.
Storage is cheap. Bandwidth is cheap. These facts blow away the basic reasons for lossy compression to exist. Why would you go to the trouble of processing a file when the effort gets you absolutely nowhere? Aside from which, lossless compression eliminates quality issues while still providing approximately a 2:1 space savings.
Stick a fork in lossy. It's done.
| Originally Posted by aimlink /img/forum/go_quote.gif Training??? I thought it was supposed to be easy and hence a travesty of audiophile-dom to encode your CD's to anything more compressed than a lossless format like FLAC or ALAC. 
|
What these threads (all 10,000 of them) always miss is this: it doesn't matter at all whether it's easy or hard to tell the difference. It doesn't matter whether the difference is highly significant or not significant at all. Lossy encoding CANNOT POSSIBLY improve sound. Best case, it offers now-irrelevant advantages of space and bandwidth savings, and leaves the music intact. So, at best it gives you something you don't need and doesn't steal anything from you.
Storage is cheap. Bandwidth is cheap. These facts blow away the basic reasons for lossy compression to exist. Why would you go to the trouble of processing a file when the effort gets you absolutely nowhere? Aside from which, lossless compression eliminates quality issues while still providing approximately a 2:1 space savings.
Stick a fork in lossy. It's done.
