Today's standard isn't "CD Quality" anymore. There is literally no audible difference between MP3 320kbps, which covers the complete range of human hearing up to 22kHz and FLAC which covers all the way to 192kHz, which is lossless. At this point digital audio has surpassed what the human ear is capable of hearing, and any advancements to this is superfluous as far as music is concerned.
The only advantage to raw or lossless formats for music is archiving, as FLAC can be converted into other formats without incurring additional quality loss. For listening, it is now more important to have good equipment rather than a lossless format, and for streaming it is generally preferable to keep bandwidth requirements down.
The only reason I can imagine to continue expanding the capabilities of lossless audio is for scientific purposes and machine learning where the limits of human sensory perception isn't a limiting factor.
> There is literally no audible difference between MP3 320kbps, which covers the complete range of human hearing up to 22kHz
Although MP3 does have some fundamental limitations that cannot be fixed no matter how much bitrate you throw at them (referring especially to the "Inoptimal window sizes" from https://web.archive.org/web/20120222124415/http://www.mp3-te...). They're not dramatic issues, to be fair, but as long as you go for lossly compression, using a somewhat more modern codec like AAC or Opus would be preferable, unless you absolutely need the maximum compatibility afforded by MP3 (though these days at least AAC support should be pretty widespread, too, plus the patents on regular ["low complexity"] AAC have expired as well).
One of the benefits of lossless compression is that you don't have to put any effort into thinking about what level of compression is good enough and who can hear the difference. It just doesn't make any difference.
Today's standard isn't "CD Quality" anymore. There is literally no audible difference between MP3 320kbps, which covers the complete range of human hearing up to 22kHz and FLAC which covers all the way to 192kHz, which is lossless. At this point digital audio has surpassed what the human ear is capable of hearing, and any advancements to this is superfluous as far as music is concerned.
The only advantage to raw or lossless formats for music is archiving, as FLAC can be converted into other formats without incurring additional quality loss. For listening, it is now more important to have good equipment rather than a lossless format, and for streaming it is generally preferable to keep bandwidth requirements down.
The only reason I can imagine to continue expanding the capabilities of lossless audio is for scientific purposes and machine learning where the limits of human sensory perception isn't a limiting factor.