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.
Aceticon
joined 2 weeks ago
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.
Yeah, but the way things are going soon it will be cheaper to buy a B-52 to live in than a house.
By that definition all "Industrial Associations" would not be capitalist.
Personally I would be wary of telling people they should trust the words of the spokespersons of most of them.
There are more than one way in which the elites and near-elites organise to advance their interests and IMHO The Guardian is very much The Voice Of The English Upper Middle Class.
The Guardian absolutely is capitalist (neoliberal, even). Just go check back on their campaign against Corbyn (a leftwinger who won the Labour Party leadership from the New Labpour neoliberals some years ago) which included such memorable pieces of slander like calling a Jewish Holocaust Survivor an anti-semite because of him in a conference about Palestine comparing some of the actions of the government of Israel with those of the Nazis, this done in order to slander Corbyn by association since he was in the same panel in that conference.
Also you can merely go back a few months to see how The Guardian supported Israel well into their Genocide (though they seem to have stop doing it quite as eagerly in the last few months).
Last but not least they very openly support in British elections the Liberal Democrats (who are neoliberals) and the New Labour faction of the Labour Party (also neoliberals) and very often have pro-privatisation articles on UK subjects and are never for bringing things back into public ownership even when privatisation has failed miserable to give better services or lower prices.
I lived in Britain for over a decade and read The Guardian for most of it, so maybe The Guardian's political slant is clearer for those familiar with British Politics.
I do agree on The Intercept and Democracy Now! though.
Can't really speak for the others with any knowledge.
"Your qualifications trump my own claims of expertise and your argument ravaged my deeply held little-more-than-political-slogan beliefs and I'm psychologically unable to handle it so I'm going to attack your style of writing, make broad claims about your personality and block you to stop the mental tension that what you wrote causes in my mind"
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:
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.