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For me FLAC, is just a matter of convenience and being able to transcode to other things from a known good baseline. I believe that CD Redbook is a plenty good format.

Redbook was not just thrown together, it was very carefully calculated to what is a optimal sound format. Some of the younger folks may not remember, but SACD and DVD-A both tried to sell high resolution audio and it was a total flop. Outside of feeling good about it, people didn't see a $$$ value in it (the 5.1 stuff was value added, but most material was stereo). Blueray audio discs tried to resurect this, but again, there was no market.

With storage and bandwidth as available as they are, it's very easy to store albums in FLAC now. I have about 30TB of storage in my house, and I don't have anything fancy, it's just that easy to buy bulk storage now-a-days.

For me, one of the biggest advantages of FLAC is being able to use CueTools and Accurip to correct read errors. You can't do that with lossy. FLAC also just happens to be the accepted standard. Apple Lossless (ALAC) would be equally good, but a lot of people have personal dislike for all things Apple. So even though both codecs are free to use, FLAC gets the moral approval.

When I was younger I was an admitted audiophile, and I had downloaded the single album "Turn Around" by Enigma in 192K to sample it and then bought the actual disc to have for my "reference stereo". Since back then (early 2000's) finding lossless albums on the Internet was not common. So I listened to this album for a couple years on my high end stereo with Class A amplifiers and Magnepans. And then one day I was cleaning up my library and I realized that I had actually transcoded the 192K version to WAV and not the CD Audio. It was a slap in the face with my own hand, since it was one of my favorite listening albums.

And that made me question what was really going on with psychoacoustics and as I read stuff about the technical aspects, I became a believer that this stuff really does work. I also am into speaker building so I understand how speakers work and how they are measured and I do measure them and I realized that like amplifiers, the fractional amounts of distortion that are added by lossy compression are nothing compared to the percentage points of distortion that are created by speaker drivers. Your ears are INCREDIBLE at fixing this stuff...even better then Accurip.

I used to have this impression in my mind that "bitrate" was somehow like how "blocky" the recreated waveform was. But reading the engineering papers and articles about psychoacoustics I learned that no, it actually recreates a very smooth waveform that is just like the original. Just the bandwidth is what gets limited. There are mathmatical formulas that can predict the path of a curve using only limited data points. The curve can be recreated perfectly with those mathmatics. This other idea that somehow lossless is more holographic or has more soundstage, I just don't see what that means. A machine doesn't know how to make S's have more or less siblance. Like many technologies, early examples of compression codecs had their quality issues, but with in the last 10 years they have ironed out those issues and are now just limited by their technical capabilities (frequency bandwith for a given bitrate for example). This is bordering on the "this speaker wire is better then that speaker wire" argument.

So for me, I baseline as much as I can in FLAC so that I know that it as high quality as I need. I then transcode to other formats as needed, for example iPods/CarPlay iPhones in my cars where I don't need utmost quality (road noise) and space is limited I would opt for 256K or 192K AAC.

I have a practical stance on this subject. I own electrostatic Martin Logan's (not the Motion stuff, the REAL Martin Logans), because I think they are very good at reproducing a musical waveform. I also think audio compression (at it's highest levels) is also very good as reproducing musical waveform. Anything above that is just "for good measure".

I also use Fakin The Funk on all my FLAC albums (ripped and downloaded), so I see a lot a frequency data. You will be happy to hear that bad transcodes for mainstream music just doesn't seem to be a thing in my experience. I have maybe only seen 1 or 2 albums out of hundreds that I've come across that appeared to be a transcode passed off as a FLAC. What I have found is that there is differences in FLAC encoders and some have a high frequency shelf lower than others (but still higher than 320 MP3). And more surprisingly, there is a lot of music out there that simply doesn't extend to the limits of Redbook CD audio. I have spent several hundred dollars buying CD albums that I wasn't happy with the downloaded results, only to find that yes, that album really does have limited frequency data. If you download an album and 1 or 2 tracks don't pass spectral tests, but all the rest of the album does, as long you don't suspect that that song was spliced into the album, then there is a very very high chance that it's OK. 100% guaranteed ok if you can find a WAV or FLAC album rip that passes Accurip and the individual song still has suboptimal spectral data.

I have seen some discussion where high harmonic instability can cause damage in amplifiers where the system is expected to go up to 96Khz (192Khz/2). The amplifier could get in a feedback loop, but you would never know it because you can't hear up there and your speakers aren't designed to play that high. You might just notice your amplifier getting hotter than normal.

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That's my take.

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