You are of course aware that what you are listening has already been tweaked, knob-turned and filtered by the recording studio, sound engineers, artists and whoever else was involved. In the end music is subjective. It sounds different and pretty much every playback system. And to the listener, it either sounds good or not. It's never "correct".
Of course. The typical music I listen to (techno mainly) goes through the producer's studio and usually has another person doing the mastering. Until now all compression is done by professionals who have ear how the end product should sound (with their Genelec studio monitors, of course). I'm fine with this.
What I don't want to have is an automatic lossy compression done by systems which the artist has no influence. Depending on the sound of the original music, this might have no effect or then the compression completely ruins the dynamics and sound of the original production.
On this time and age, bandwidth is cheap and the connections are fast. Disk space is cheap and cloud storage is cheap. I don't see so many reasons to use lossy files anymore and with flac I can be sure that I have the closest possible copy of the production that left the artist's studio.
Yes, you are definitely conflating dynamic range compression (dynamics) and data compression (codecs). These are very different, completely unrelated issues that unfortunately bear the same linguistic shorthand of "compression".
In the way they are commonly used, lossy compression codecs have zero impact on dynamics. Correctly used, lossy compression can have zero audible consequence no matter how good the equipment or how "golden" the ears.
That said, a recording studio shouldn't ever be dealing with lossy codecs, because there's simply no need to, and because there's a sliver of possibility that the inaudible lossy artefacts could compound into an audible artefact over multiple generations.
The only time a lossy codec should ever be used is by distribution networks and/or end users.
> Correctly used, lossy compression can have zero audible consequence no matter how good the equipment or how "golden" the ears.
That's why the compression should be done by me or by the original producer to have it done correctly case by case. Lossless is a good compromise it being easier to apply automatically for any kind of music.
For some definitions of "all" I agree. i.e. for Hifi quality Stereo Music to end users where file size and bandwidth are not so important, yes fine, but in situations where space or bandwidth are limited / expensive, AAC can achieve transparency at well below 256kbps with most music, to most people, in which case it would often be overkill --especially for Audio Books, lectures, plays or other mainly speech content... conversely for 5.1 or greater multi-channel audio it's often insufficient.
But this still doesn't solve the original issue: if I buy music, it should be me who packs the files if I need to lose some information and I should own the original copies lossless. And as I also said, bandwidth and storage space are super cheap nowadays, so I really don't see so many reasons to use lossy codecs.
They don't have to be conflating those things. For example are you sure Youtube doesn't apply dynamic processing to uploaded files? I wouldn't be surprised if there is some sound processing performed to help make the average phone video sound better.
Depends on the kind of music. If you're listening to the recording of an harpsichordist playing Scarlatti in a room, then you can measure the difference between what you hear through your speakers and what you would have heard if you were sitting five meters behind during the play. And then being more correct means having less difference.
