ps all amps sound the same to the human ear, so there. except arc. they just suck!!!lol

excellent workshop Goalie...notice who the people are...audio engineering society..that's right, the same people who invent, design, manufacture and tune all the components we use, and are the same ones who are telling you that your ears can't be trusted and there is no such thing as sonic voodoo. I guess they don't know of what they speak, but know enough to create it all.

I can't prove anything. Maybe the difference is imagined, but I don't think so. A 160gb iPod will hold my entire CD collection uncompressed and leave me with ~60gb for expansion , so I'm sticking with AIFF.

^^nothing wrong with that...everyone has their preferences and different codecs have advantages and disadvantages..speed, id tags, compatibility etc... Also, if you honestly believe you hear a difference sujectively, that's fine too, nothing wrong with psychoacoustic improvements (after all it all has to be processed by our individual brains, and if your brain or my brain likes one better than the other...why not indulge it). All we're saying is it's the same information.

lossy and lossless
 

"Lossless" audio files are compressed - but they are compressed mathematically. You can uncompress them to the EXACT same file that they originated from (AIFF, WAV) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel%...%E2%80%93Welch.

Take this analogy - everyone knows zip files? You take a folder full of Word Docs or Excel sheets - it's 20Mb in size. You compress it with Winzip or Windows' built-in compress function - it turns into a zip archive that's only 8Mb or something. Now email that to your buddy. He uncompresses it and he gets all those original files, exactly as they appeared originally on your computer. Perfect reproductions. This is "lossless" compression. It is like FLAC files. Smaller but still containing enough information to PERFECTLY reproduce the original.

Now imagine if Winzip had an option that said "Compress more - use lossy compression". You select the same folder of files, compress it down and this time it's only 5Mb. Awesome - this will take much less tiem to email. But this time, when he opens up the files, the file strucure is still there, and it looks like all the same files are in the folder, but when he opens up the first one, instead of the Word doc looking like this:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy frog.

It looks like this:

"th qk fx jmpd ovr th frg".

It sort of looks the same, you can sort of get the same meaning out of it, but it is not exactly the same as the original. this is "Lossy" compression. This is like MP3 files.

Obviously the new winzip is somewhat smart about what it decides to remove - this is like good MP3 algorithms - they cut data that is not necessary to get the general idea of what the original was like. But they still cut out material that was in the original - it cannot be uncompressed to be the same as the original.