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Comment by hctaw | Hacker News Reader

Lossless is only useful as an archival or intermediary format during production/recording where you can't tolerate lossy encoding.

For listening purposes lossy codecs are all capable of being perceptually lossless for trained or untrained listeners, including MP3. MP3 gets a bad rap because low bitrate mp3 does sound awful. 320kbps or higher is sufficient for 99% of listeners, including audiophiles. Most listeners can't pass a double blind study in pristine conditions, let alone average ones.

It's a lot like 192kHz 32 bit recordings. 96kHz audio bandwidth and almost 200dB of SNR has a purpose, but that purpose is not for day to day listening. Your ears, brain, speakers and amplifiers cannot reproduce or perceive the extra information.

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There are reasons to prefer seeking out lossless, though, even if you could just as well convert them to lossy once you have downloaded them. First of all, sometimes the lossy versions of downloads have "loudness wars" compressed dynamics, since the label assumes that anyone listening to it will be using earbuds in some loud public space. The same recording sold in lossless from an audiophile-focused source, however, will preserve the original mastering that preserves all that nice dynamic range.

Also, if you want music that was recorded in 5.1 surround sound, sometimes the surround version is only available from lossless sources, while lossy sources sell only the stereo downmix.

Masters will differ for target platforms, sure, but do you have any examples of records with a different master for MP3 for digital distribution and a lossless record from an "audiophile-focused source"?

> sometimes the lossy versions of downloads have "loudness wars" compressed dynamics

The loudness war has been over for years, and it was precisely due to lossless CD audio that it existed in the first place.

Sure, but...

Have you seen the size of disks and network bandwidth recently? There is absolutely no reason to bother with lossy audio compression.

> MP3 gets a bad rap because low bitrate mp3 does sound awful.

It's also the case that MP3 encoders got better over time, and if you're considering the sound of a 128kbps (or 96kbps) MP3 encoded by the Fraunhofer encoder you got from IRC in the late 90s; it's just not going to be good.

Though it sounden incredible then, compared to the blip blop sounds we were used to.

I’m not sure that it sounded better - it was more that the quality was “good enough” for the amount of precious disk space that was used.

Back before mp3s became ubiquitous, you could rip a CD to .wav files and it would basically sound identical to what was on the CD. But then you’d also be using some 600MB versus the same CD sounding not quite as good but only using like 40MB and at that time that was a lot of disk space to use.

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