Lossy v Lossless

[Afrobean]

Originally Posted by Anthony P

that is not true, lossy loses a lot of sounds that can be heard, it does not discriminate between can and can't be heard, it has a max bit bucket and everything must fit.

Actually, there are plenty of people who would never know they were missing anything if they weren't told so. There are even people who can't even tell the difference between lossy and lossless.

Then there are those who think they can hear the difference, but it's really placebo more than them actually sensing the difference. Their hearing just isn't as sharp as they'd like to think it is, but because of the placebo effect they still "can hear" how much "better" it sounds to have high resolution lossless audio.

I would think people who legitimately could tell the difference unaided and with complete accuracy is a very small group of the total population. That's not to say that lossless audio isn't something we should all want to have, it's just that for many persons can't REALLY tell the difference on their own (especially average people, not the audiophiles or technically minded people here).

Notice also that hearing is a sense for which people aren't rewarded in normal life for having extra acuity. For vision, sharper eyesight can be extremely useful and very helpful in everyday life, but being able to hear so finely that higher resolution audio becomes apparent isn't a talent that will help a person in real life (nor is it something which can be "fixed" with something like glasses or corrective surgery).

But hey, the whole point of higher quality digital media is to push the boundary to the point where a human can no longer tell that it's digital media. I'm glad audio is to that point.

ps of the compression which does differentiate between "can be heard" and "cannot be heard", even that's not perfect. For a person with decent hearing, try playing a lower bitrate MP3 on a higher volume and you'll notice a lot of the places where sounds are missing due to compression.