[jamesperrett]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

"CD-quality" involves significant compression/expansion.... it's an ancient standard designed to be replayed on systems with what are now spectacularly-low in terms of processor-power.

FLAC or similar modern encoding standards can do a much better job, and the 'CPU horsepower' to decode it is dirt-cheap. The 'stuff' I have encoded here using FLAC@320Kbit/sec is rather good.

Seems to be much confusion here...

The 44.1kHz sample rate, 16 bit data recorded to CD has had no data compression applied before being mastered onto the disc. The data will have been encoded with additional error correction bits but that process is transparent to the user. What comes out is exactly the same as what goes in.

Flac is a form of lossless audio compression where the data can be stored in roughly half the space required by uncompressed audio data and the original data stream can be completely recovered when the data is decompressed. Flac doesn't have a set data rate as it depends somewhat on the material being compressed but CD quality audio would be the equivalent of just over 700kb/s.

Numbers like 320kb/s are normally used by lossy compression schemes - in fact 320kb/s is the highest bit rate normally used by mp3.

There are streaming services that will serve CD quality lossless data (I think even Apple are now offering such a service) and even one or two that claim better than CD quality. Whether it is worth going for a better than CD quality service is debateable as the vast majority of the files they would be supplied with are 16 bit, 44.1kHz files.