Aceticon

A PNG is indeed an imperfect representation of reality. Are you claiming that the lossness in the data domain of the compression algorithm in a PNG means its contents are a perfect representation of reality?!

(Funnilly enough, the imperfections in the data contained on a PNG are noticeable for some and the lower the "sampling rate" - i.e. number of pixels, bits per pixel - the easier it is to spot, same as audio)

As I've been trying to explain in my last posts, a non-Techie "audophile" when they claim FLAC is not lossless aren't likely to be talking about it's technical characteristics in the data domain (i.e. that data that you take out of a FLAC file is exactly the same as it goes in) but that its contents don't sound the same as the original performance (or, most likely, a recording made via an entirelly analog pathway, such as in an LP).

Is it really that hard to grasp the concept that the word "lossless" means different things for a Technical person with a background in digital audio processing and a non-Technical person who simply compares the results of a full analog recording and reproduction pathway with those of a digital one which include a FLAC file and spots the differences?

This feels like me trying to explain to Junior Developers that the Users are indeed right and so are the Developers - they're just reading different meanings for the same word and, no, you can't expect non-Techie people to know the ins and outs of Technical terms and no they're not lusers because of it. Maybe the "audiphile" was indeed wrong and hence "Confidently Incorrect", but maybe he was just using lossless in a broader sense of "nothing lost" like a normal person does, whilst the other one was using the technical meaning of it (no data loss) so they were talking past each other - that snippet is too short to make a call on that.

So yeah, I stand by my point that this is the kind of Dunning-Krugger shit junior techies put out before they learn that most people don't have the very same strictly defined technical terms on their minds as the junior techies do.

On my world account which I left a while ago I have various posts with like 20+ votes for and 20+ votes against because they were insulting/hurtful for the political tribalists but did actually make sense for those whose love for the tribe did not overrode their thinking ability.

Way too many people grow a purely emotional relationship with a politial party so never actually analyse what they do and have knee-jerk reactions to criticism of their beloved party, which paradoxically leads that party to become worse over time because in the absence of criticism of it, the shit done inside the party by the sociopaths than naturally seek power, goes on unchallenged and festers.

Granted, it's easier to analyse US politics from the outside, but I actually behave the same when it comes to the politics of my country and even the leadership and membership of the political party I'm a member of here.

If one thinks a lot, likes to learn and, maybe more important, thinks about knowledge and learning things, that person will probably get there.

A certain educational background probably helps but is neither required nor sufficient, IMHO.

Zionism is as much "Jews" as Nazism was blue-eyed blonde people: they're both very similar ethno-Fascist extremely-racist ideologies which glue themselves to an ethnic group claiming to represent them even while plenty of members of that ethnic group very overtly say "They do not represent me".

Never believe Fascists when they claim to represent a nation (in the case of the traditional Fascists) or a race (in the case of the ethno-Fascists). In fact, the more general rules is "Never believe Fascists".

The Theatre Of Identity on both sides of the aisle in the US was always bullshit to try and get more votes, if done differently:

• Most of the Democracts don't really care about Equality (especially not in the Wealth domain, though they pay lip service to the fight against a few non-Wealth inequalities), they care about themselves and the ultra-rich.
• The Republicans don't care about America or The American People, they care about themselves and the ultra-rich.

Mind you, this is a pretty common pattern in other countries with electoral systems that boost a pair of "center" parties - there will be a "Right" one preaching some kind of nationalist pro-nation message and a "Left" one preaching anti-discrimination along racial/gender/sexual-orientation (but never wealth) lines, but they both serve the interest of the same people and will even get together to pass legislation that increases their own salaries, reduces the effectiveness of the fight against corruption or benefit some large well entrenched "regime" corporations who (by an amazing coincidence) employ in highly paid positions lots of politicians when they retire.

There are wankers everywhere and it doesn't take that many wankers as a proportion of the population to screw things up for everybody else.

They're deemed "lossless" because there are no data losses - the word actually comes from the broader domain of data handling, specifically Compression were for certain things - like images, audio and video - there are compression algorithms that lose some information (lossy) and those which don't (lossless), for example JPEG vs PNG.

However data integrity is not at all what your average "audiophile" would be talking about when they say there are audio losses, so when commenting on what an non-techie "audiophile" wrote people here used that "losslessness" from the data domain to make claims in a context which is broader that merelly the area were the problem of data integrity applies and were it's insuficient to disprove the claims of said "audiophile".

I think it's a general thing with highly capable persons in expert and highly intellectual domains that eventually you kinda figure out what Socrates actually meant with "All I know is that I know nothing"

My point being that unlike the misunderstanding (or maybe just mis-explanation) of many here, even a digital audio format which is technically named "lossless" still has losses compared to the analog original and there is no way around it (you can reduce the losses with a higher sampling rate and more bits per sample, but never eliminate it because the conversion to digital is a quantization of an infinite precision input).

"Losslessness" in a digital audio stream is about the integrity of the digital data itself, not about the digital audio stream being a perfect reproduction of the original soundwaves. With my mobile phone I can produce at home a 16 bit PCM @ 44.7 kHz (same quality as a CD) recording of the ambient sounds and if I store it as an uncompressed raw PCM file (or a Wav file, which is the same data plus some headers for ease of use) it's technically deemed "lossless" whilst being a shit reproduction of the ambient sounds at my place because the capture process distorted the signal (shitty shit small microphone) and lost information (the quantization by the ADC in the mobile phone, even if it's a good one, which is doubtful).

So maybe, just maybe, some "audiophiles" do notice the difference. I don't really know for sure but I certainly won't dismiss their point about the imperfect results of the end-to-process, with the argument that because after digitalization the digital audio data has been kept stored in a lossless format like FLAC or even raw PCM, then the whole thing is lossless.

One of my backgrounds is Digital Systems in Electronics Engineering, which means I also got to learn (way back in the days of CDs) how the whole process end to end works and why, so most of the comments here talking about the full end-to-end audio capture and reproduction process (which is what a non-techie "audiophile" would be commenting about) not being lossy because the digital audio data handling is "lossless", just sounds to me like the Dunning-Krugger Effect in action.

People here are being confidently incorrect about the confident incorrection of some guy on the Internet, which is pretty ironic.

PS: Note that with high enough sampling rates and bits per sample you can make it so precise that the quantization error is smaller that the actual noise in the original analog input, which de facto is equivalent to no losses in the amplitude domain and so far into the high frequencies in the time domain that no human could possibly hear it, and if the resulting data is stored in a lossless format you could claim that the end-to-end process is lossless (well, ish - the capture of the audio itself into an analog signal itself has distortions and introduces errors, as does the reproduction at the other end), but that's something quite different from claiming that merely because the audio data is stored in a "lossless" format it yields a signal as good as the original.

Strictly speaking, as soon as an analog signal is quantized into digital samples there is loss, both in the amplitude domain (a value of infinite precision is turned into a value that must fit in a specific number of bits, hence of finited precision) and on the time domain (digitalization samples the analog input at specific time intervals, whilst the analog input itself is a continuous wave).

That said, whether that is noticeable if the sampling rate and bits per sample are high enough is a whole different thing.

Ultra high frequency sounds might be missing or mangled at a 44.7 kHz sampling rather (a pretty standard one and used in CDs) but that should only be noticeable to people who can hear sounds above 22.35kHz (who are rare since people usually only hear sounds up to around 20kHz, the oldest the person the worse it gets) and maybe a sharp ear can spot the error in sampling at 24 bit, even though its miniscule (1/2^24 of the sampling range assuming the sampling has a linear distribution of values) but its quite unlikely.

That said, some kinds of trickery and processing used to make "more sound" (in the sense of how most people perceive the sound quality rather than strictly measured in Phsysics terms) fit in fewer bits or fewer samples per second in a way that most people don't notice might be noticeable for some people.

Remember most of what we use now is anchored in work done way back when every byte counted, so a lot of the choices were dictated by things like "fit an LP as unencoded audio files - quite luterallyplain PCM, same as in Wav files - on the available data space of a CD" so it's not going to be ultra high quality fit for the people at the upper ends of human sound perception.

All this to say that FLAC encoded audio files do have losses versus analog, not because of the encoding itself but because Analog to Digital conversion is by its own nature a process were precision is lost even if done without any extra audio or data handling process that might distort the audio samples even further, plus generally the whole thing is done at sampling rates and data precision's fit for the average human rather than people at the upper end of the sound perception range.

Studies have shown that something as simple as being tall makes people be more likely to be looked towards as leaders.

Make nuke mad enough and nuke blows off.

I'm pretty sure the few survivors in the resulting wasteland would get bored pretty fast of making Non Credible Defense jokes about the waves of cockroaches trying to take over the World from humans.

Best not argue with nuke.