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.