In article , RJH wrote:

In this sense I think it'd be useful to understand a little more about
why I might always prefer an uncompressed music file to something lossy
of the exact same recording - even if, quantitatively at least, I can't
express any difference between the two. And technically, no difference

I'm not quite sure what you mean above. If you're listening to a version
that has been subject to 'lossy' encoding then, by definition, the result
will tend to be altered. e.g. If you look at

http://jcgl.orpheusweb.co.uk/temp/in...lacresults.png

you can see that the lower ('diff') plot for a recent R3 broadcast shows
that the aac (lossy) and flac (loss free) versions differ at a level
typically about 40dB below the flac version. For THD this would mean about
1% which would be audible. But if I listen to the 'diff' it sounds like an
odd kind of modulated noise. So in practice the aac and flac may sound
subtly different - but in a way you may not notice or be aware of.

Jim

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