[wazoo2u]

Originally Posted by dacrawdaddy

Supposedly, the audible frequencies of MP3, OGG, and other formats that are 'lossy' still fall well outside of the limitations of human ears. In other words, the lowest frequency ranges of these file formats are well below what we can hear, and the highs are well beyond what we can hear. So, technically, there's not going to be an audible difference between a (medium or high bitrate) MP3 and a SHN or FLAC file. So they are fine for personal use and for smaller storage size.

....I'm glad this community and others support technology and methods that educate about and support 'lossless' archival quality music.

First, glad your on the bandwagon and understand that lossless is far preferable to lossy.

OK... just a point of clarification. ALL lossy compression schemes use mathematical algorythims to "fool" the brain into thinking that it hears frequencies that aren't really there. It's inaccurate to focus on the "frequencies beyond human hearing" composition of lossy files, since the information that is missing is WELL WITHIN the range of human hearing. The codec is simply fooling your ear into thinking that you hear things that actually ARE NOT THERE. This is why lossy technology basically sucks, and the long term effects of listening to these "pseudo frequencies" has yet to be seen. There is some speculation in the scientific community that prolonged listening to lossy codecs can actually damage human hearing.

I'm told that OGG sounds better than 256 CBR MP3, but that doesn't mean it's not missing frequencies that would be present in a lossless file. While it might be difficult to hear much of a difference (and this depends on the sonic composition of the material) between a high bitrate encode and a lossless file on portable electronics, when you put these into a critical listening environment, there's no comparison to be made.