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Re:Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio by marcan_42 on Monday May 17, 2021 @10:54AM (#27184136)
It is useful to make the distinction, because some people do want to have the highest available quality (and this is not, inherently, a bad thing) - having a hard line that separates out the minor, but nonzero effects, from the pure snake oil, is useful.

And as I said, really, the main reason to avoid lossy compression at this point is due to generational loss and post processing. Lossy compression should be considered a final processing step - what you do to store music that is then going to be delivered directly to a listener, unaltered. If you're going to do anything else, you'd do much better with a lossless version.

That is not to say, of course, that if all you have is a lossy version, it is a major problem :-)

For the record, my lossy format of choice for e.g. putting stuff on my phone is 96kbps Opus. Even that much is excellent for casual listening. But I much prefer to keep lossless FLACs as my primary archival storage - not just because that way I can take advantage of better compression formats as they come (e.g. how I moved from ~130k Vorbis to ~96k Opus), but also because compression makes a massive difference with certain kinds of processing and editing which I sometimes enjoy doing. All the psychoacoustics go out the window if you start doing things like subtracting instrumental mixes from full mixes to get vocal tracks out.

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