on the talk of new codecs . . .I often purchase Hi-Res music from Hi-Res audio and I remember last spring they started to debut some kind of new lossless codec but that seems to have gone over like a lead balloon. I could be wrong but I haven't noticed more mention of it. Meanwhile FLAC still seems to reign supreme.
I honestly haven't bothered with lossless codecs yet, other than for testing.
I used to think it was just wasting your storage, but these days storage is so large that this concern is mostly insignificant.
The thing is though, I have a pretty high end chain. Good DAC, good amp, pretty decent headphones and speakers (without going nuts) and I'm going to me honest. I have sat down and A/B compared Spotify's "very high" quality OGG streams and the albums I own on CD, and I cannot tell the difference at all.
To be fair, some CD's have very poor "loudness war" masters compressing everything to 96% volume and thus effectively lowering the bit rate of the sound quality compared to a full dynamic range master, and that can make things sound ****ty, but I maintain that as long as you have a competent 16bit 44.1khz source, and you compress it with high quality OGG or VBR MP3 using a decent codec like LAME, it truly is transparent.
Now I know the gut reaction from the audiophile types is that I just have ****ty ears, but I have had them tested over the years both by audiologists and through popular online tests. At 43 I can still hear the "mosquito tone" only teenagers are supposed to be able to hear. I even used to cringe on the production floor at the plant I used to work when the ultrasonic welders engaged, as it was truly bothersome to me, but no one else could hear it.
Still that is very subjective and anecdotal data. What I really hang my hat on is the Hydrogenaudio.org study that was done 15 years ago.
They created an A/B test program of several tracks that would randomly play back either a clean .wav rip of a CD or the same track compressed in MP3 with LAME's then setting "--alt-preset standard" (the flags in LAME have changed since then, but this was a standard middle of the road VBR quality setting). People who considered themselves audiophiles were then invited to run the program, and listen to it on their own audiophile hardware and test themselves. They were given as much time as they wanted to listed to both tracks and then had to click on the one they thought was compressed.
The results were that even self proclaimed audiophiles with high end audio who would talk all day about how awful mp3 sound quality was, only picked the right track about 50% of the time. In other words, the same as if they were not listening to the tracks and just randomly selecting one.
So yeah, I am utterly convinced that no sound standard above 16bit 44.1khz PCM is of any value for listening purposes (editing is another thing all together. There high bitrate audio definitely helps). HD Audio, DSD, all of these fancy high fidelity standards are really just a bunch of bunk.
That, and there is little to no benefit of a lossless compression over a competent lossy compression.
