Is lossless music truly lossless if it's not bit perfect?

Is lossless music truly lossless if its not bit perfect??

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Probably a separate discussion I would imagine.

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This is akin to asking what is the meaning of life?

First we must live more. We must listen (to music) more.

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42…:thinking:

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You most likely know that you could check out Wikipedia to find out more about how lossless encoders/decoders work - maybe start with flac as an example?

But that’s not what you’re after, right?

There have been reports of platinum eared listeners about degradation due to the respective computer’s workload difference, operating system differences, yada yada yada

This thread will surely drift into muddy waters soon, so I’m getting my popcorn machine heated up just now… enjoy!

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In a pure info theory sense, no, bit perfect music is not truly lossless. On the other hand, from a psychoacoustic background, there can be (depending on the listen, system, context, source material) losses of data so small or of a type that there is no material difference.

Also, as TheHammer pointed out, “42”

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Lossless tracks are lossless tracks regardless of what your system does to them after they have been read from the media.

Prime rib eye steak is still prime rib eye steak even if you put ketchup on it……

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Do you want to talk jitter or what? :grinning:

In relation to the performance every recording ist lossy. Also at playback you lose dynamics, frequencies, micro tuning as no equipment can reconstruct the stored data perfectly. So a lossless file only prevents loss at a specific step.

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Well, if you want to go that far, technically, everything you see and here is lossy too. That means what you hear at a live acoustic concert or see watching a sunset at the beach would be lossy. Does that we mean we should not care if a recording is lossless or not? Of course not. We should want the recording to have as much fidelity to the original format of the recording as possible.

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what is your understanding of lossless music?

Sounds like a Patrick Mahomes fan, with the ketchup on a steak reference, unless, of course, you are really Jake from State Farm!

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It is simple; music reproduces at home is exact bit perfect of the original master studio copy. Don’t get confused with ‘lossless codec’ used for encapsulation such as FLAC.

Or think it another way, someone record a master copy in the recording studio and give you this copy to play it at home. This is lossless music.

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And “truly lossless” is what exactly?

I never knew there was a "somewhat lossless’’. I always thought it was a case of “is it is or is it ain’t”

Yep, 0 or 1. If you send a 1 and receive a 0, the path wasn’t lossless.

the right question should be, is lossless music played bit perfectly?

No one in the industry uses that as a definition of a “lossless” recording.

Humans have lossy interfaces. Our frequency bandwidth be it vision or audio is very limited and does not recreate absolute reality, but builds our own reality.

The only truly lossless medium is VINYL :crazy_face:

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