Wow, thanks for the enlightenment ! ?Oh lossless where do I begin?
Lossless is only really noticeable in certain situations in my opinion. If you have a late 90’s early 2000’s Loudness War effected CD with no dynamic range and you are just converting to listen on your phone through a pair of low - mid end headphones, then providing you don’t convert to a stupidly low bitrate or have the encoder run as fast as it can lossy should sound as good as the lossless. Compressed audio needs bitrate and time to encode. Some low bitrate lossy stuff can sound better than high bitrate lossy stuff if you have error correction and multi pass encoding turned on. Lossless wouldn’t offer too much more in this situation.
That being said I have music by a band called Opeth I am a big fan of theirs and I managed to acquire some 96Khz/24bit FLAC vinyl rips of their discography and compared to the Apple Music version its night and day the rips sound incredible. However that is not solely because of lossless although it probably helps a little, its due to vinyl having a significantly higher dynamic range compared to the digital version which Apple would’ve got their AACs from the dynamic range allows for the little nuances to shine through which are also more preserved due to the lossless encoding. Plus I’m also a sucker for the vinyl sound with the crackles and pops so that may be effecting may enjoyment of them too.
By comparison I have some 96Khz/24bit FLAC files from a band called Death and because these were ripped from a CD the dynamic range has already been crushed a bit and to my ears there isn’t a huge amount of difference between the lossy Apple Music version and the lossless files.
What you are listening for is the cymbals and the very high frequency accents of the music, a poor encode and these will sound wavy almost as if you are listening underwater. This is more noticeable if you have a high dynamic range song where these little accents aren’t drowned out by everything else. I have a few Apple Music songs that exhibit this unfortunately and when you notice it it sounds awful, so in this case this is where the lossless versions will really come into their own. However for about 90% of the time and situations you find yourself in lossy should be as good as lossless. Obviously if you are a teenager with stupidly high end studio monitors then lossless may be the way to go, but as adults loose their high frequency hearing as we get older for most lossy should be good enough.
Actually, I've never listened to high-end quality audio equipment so I can't quite argue about what you said.
I'm 32 btw and I think I can hear some slight differences between AAC and Apple's lossless format. It's something that I feel and can't explain with words. I guess of course that lossless with a high-end equipment could sound much better, however I think that I may be discerning a better quality in what I'm listening to with a lossless format, even with BT headphones. Do you think it could be possible or am I just easily influenced by marketing?
I'd gladly give an ear to these
few Apple Music songs that exhibit this unfortunately and when you notice it it sounds awful, so in this case this is where the lossless versions will really come into their own.
Would you mind sharing the names?