[Five]

1. yeah, that is lossy and has to be from the station or you wouldn't see the carrier up top. If it was encoded after recording and/or digitization there would be black up top. also gotta say that is an awful mix the way the hihats are breathing, but that's off-topic

2. this is a rare case, I've only seen it a few times. it is a mirror image with the "death star groove" down the middle. I have a vhs I transferred about a year and a half ago that a friend of mine taped off Canadian tv around 1997 and I took the audio from my hifi vcr into a soundblaster live! card and it looked exactly like that. I can't explain it, but I'm quite sure it is lossless.

3. that's gotta be MD (atrac) transferred thru the analog input of a soundcard.

4. can't really tell with this one... there's no direct evidence I can find other than the cutoff. I would guess it is the result of a terrible transfer due to the sample rate being set 12kHz which is the kind of setting you would use for speech. I wouldn't trade this, see if you can track down the master and get a proper transfer of it. or trade it one on one with a heavy warning and only if the is the only known source on earth!