The arguments for lossy codecs vs. dithering / bit reduction aren't identical, but it's a pretty good indictment of the SAVE ALL THE BITS argument. On the same domain as the parent article.
Amusingly enough, I did buy 3 classic albums that I didn't already own, in 24/192 format, and I even have an outboard D/A converter so I can at least tell myself it's not wasted.
The article is about Redbook CD audio (44.1/16) vs. "HiRes" lossless audio. It's about the limits of the human ear, and the engineering tradeoffs available for supporting resolutions and depths > 44.1/16.
That's not what the FLAC vs. lossy discussion is about, at all.
It actually is. The major "hack" in lossy formats is psychoacoustics. It's literally about removing the things you don't hear. At lower bitrates, it's about removing the things you hear less.
The argument Montey is making for 44.1/16 vs. 192/24 is partly about the hardware and distortion of higher formats, but he spends a lot more time in there talking about what we don't hear.
The real point is: what we hear is the important quantifier for audio formats. Arguments from data purity are almost entirely the same quasi-religious stuff that the hi-fi world has been producing since at least the 70s.
(And again, it's weird: there's nothing similar in images: lossless photos just don't make sense for general consumption; they're only useful for archival and post-processing purposes. But there are immeasurably less imagephiles than audiophiles. My guess is that it's because there was a time when being an audiophile was a class signifier.)
Even the original thread author was mostly making an argument from purity rather than from audio quality. Audio quality is the only thing that matters.
FLAC is great for some stuff (again, where you may need to reencode, where you're creating archives, etc.), but for casual listening, it's entirely pointless. For the same reason Montey spends most of that article on: because you can't hear a difference.
Montey is the creator of Vorbis. He's spent a lot of time thinking about what people do and don't hear. The reasons people don't hear differences in 192 kHz and 44.1 kHz are different than the reasons people don't hear the difference between a 256 kbit MP3 and a FLAC (at 256 kbps, virtually noone can hear a difference), but it's still an appeal to ears being the important instruments in measuring audio quality, not bits, or gold plated cables, or other esoteric things that seem to beleaguer impassioned audio hobbyists.
I know that Neil Young's "solution" went nowhere. I have all my music now, and I'm certainly not going to convert it all just to save some GBs. But you've certainly eliminated any temptation on my part to evangelize. Happy listening.
https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
The arguments for lossy codecs vs. dithering / bit reduction aren't identical, but it's a pretty good indictment of the SAVE ALL THE BITS argument. On the same domain as the parent article.