When we talk about lossless in the audio encoding world, we aren’t comparing directly with the analog wave, as there will always be loss when storing an analog signal in a digital machine. Lossless formats are compared to pure PCM, which is the uncompressed way of representing a waveform in bits.
With audio, every step you take to transform it, capture it, move it or store it, even while working with the analog waveform, degrades it. Even by picking it up with a microphone you’re already degrading the waveform. However, generally, the official release CDs or WebDLs are considered the original, lossless, master file. Everything that manages to keep that exact waveform is lossless (FLAC, AIFF, WAV, ALAC…), and everything that distorts it further is considered lossy (MP3, AAC, OPUS…).
Additionally, a “bad transcode” (which is a transcode that involves lossy formats somewhere that isn’t the last step) is also considered lossy, for obvious reason. Transcoding FLAC to MP3 to WAV stores the exact same waveform that MP3 made, as it is the lowest common denominator, even though the audio is stored as WAV in its final form.
Transcoding between lossy formats also loses more data, even if the final lossy format can store more bits or is more accurate than the original. This is one of the main problems with lossy codecs. MP3 192kbps to MP3 320kbps will lose information, just like MP3 to AAC. That’s why, normally, we use a lossless file and transcode it to every lossy format (FLAC to MP3, then FLAC to AAC…). This way you’re not losing more than what the lossy format already loses.
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.
What I meant is yeah, you are right about that, but no, lossless formats aren’t called lossless because they don’t lose anything to the original, they’re called lossless because, after compressing and decompressing, you get the exact same file that you initially compressed.
Another commenter on this post explained it really well.
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”.
