There's no evidence that more than a very small percentage of humans (if even that) can differentiate between reasonable bit-rate pyscho-acoustic (lossy) compression and the source material.
Double-blind tests have made this abundantly clear.
If you really can hear a difference, you've either got particularly poorly compressed files, or are in a tiny minority of us.
A huge portion of all compressed media files are poorly compressed files. Often these poorly compressed files come directly from music distributor with the wrong compression settings, or with really really bad noise. Remember, many music distributors are working with old systems (unable to upgrade either due to driver/software or licensing issues), outdated software, and plain old junky audio interfaces, etc.
Lossless (when used properly and able to algorithmically guarantee what comes out == what goes into the compression toolchain) avoids the whole issue altogether, and that's what's valuable about it.
Focusing on whether compression captures every nuance of uncompressed sound is the wrong battle. The real battle is against careless distributors and bad artifacts introduced by poor compression settings and often incorrectly coded compression utilities used throughout the music industry.
(ie we on hn might all be using Lame or the Fraunhofer mp3 encoders, but a lot of music producers/distributors will be using custom / closed source encoders, or even audio workstations with the encoder implemented in hardware, and those might or might not be encoding mp3 correctly.)
Poorly compressed files is usually the problem, and when lossless files are relatively low burden (what's a few gb between friends. I'm not storing them on my 64gb ipod anymore), i'd rather just have the lossless ones.
I'm aware of those studies. Nonetheless, the difference to my ears, in my settings, with my equipment, is not slight. It's screaming-in-your-face obvious.
Whether it's because of the math or because of poorly done encoding is only of academic interest. It happens regardless of the cause. Using a lossless encoding resolves the issue entirely.
Interesting - it's a persistent and annoying problem. I assumed that better bit rates would improve the issue but most compressed music I listen to is AAC where it may be better.
It's interesting how easy miscommunication happens. I said it's mainly for one thing, not the other. I didn't say it wasn't for or never used for other purposes. People are misreading that "not the other" as though I used a period instead of a comma. Read it as "not mainly for listening" and you'll read it the way it's intended.
Carry on listening to a format most people use for purposes other than listening if that works for you. I can't stop you with a simple dependent clause. You're safe.
And archiving. Personally I prefer to have the lossless format stored in my digital vault and use a lossy version on my portable devices for storage efficiency.
