What do you think the "psycho" in psycho-acoustic means?
Well, in your particular case....
They're cutting out bits and taking short cuts that human beings aren't
supposed to notice based on idiosyncrasies of human hearing to reduce file sizes. It's indeed by definition a trick to fool human hearing, much in the same way showing still images at 24 fps fools the human eye into perceiving motion.
I'm not sure you understand the definition of the word trick. There is no "illusion" or "deception" involved. For example, if I cannot hear above 20kHz, it doesn't hurt to remove that data. It's completely extraneous. We are talking about sound reproduction for humans to listen to, not dogs or some other creature, so the data present only needs to be heard by humans. That's not a "trick" at all in my book.
Lossy compression is simply more advanced removal of things the human brain is incapable of hearing. At some bit-rates, you can hear the difference. With enough bits (still vastly reduced), it becomes inaudible. I now that is unacceptable to some minds' way of thinking (it's a natural reaction to think you'd prefer lossless compression), but that doesn't mean they can actually hear a difference when they don't know which is being played in a double-blind ABX style test.
I've done my own testing and I'm satisfied I'm not missing anything converting my CDs to 256kbps AAC. Even if I'd psychologically prefer to use the lossless versions, I'm prevented out of convenience. iTunes simply does not handle separate databases for home and mobile use and I need the space on my iPod to carry more material. Furthermore, my car stereo will play AAC and MP4 on a USB stick, but not ALAC or FLAC for that matter. Managing separate ALAC and AAC libraries is way too much a PITA to bother for differences I've never been able to hear in a blind test anyway so the ALAC library is simply an archival backup of my CDs at this point.
On albums I know very well, that I've listened to hundreds of times over a decade or more, I can tell the difference. Especially in spots where lossy encoders fail and create artifacts.
I can hear artifacts at 128kbps MP3 with many songs with no problem at all. It's a different story at 256kbps AAC. But without any blind testing, I could easily fool myself into thinking I was hearing a difference. Entire industries within the audiophile community are based on such imagination processes (e.g. overpriced interconnect wire, for one thing).
A magazine like Stereophile has every reason to poo-poo double-blind testing since their advertisers wouldn't like it very much if they told everyone they were total overpriced snake-oil. So they use multi-thousand dollar interconnects in their "reference" systems and $25,000 DACs and readers then want that kind of equipment too even if it makes no audible difference what-so-ever in reality. I realize it's harder psychologically with a format that does demonstrate audible artifacts at lower bit-rates, but at some point they are indistinguishable (as shown by double blind testing). That point is lower for AAC (more efficient) than MP3.
And further, by definition, all of these perception tests are subjective.
Sorry, but double-blind testing isn't subjective. It's a scientific method to evaluate real perceptive differences with human hearing. It's reproducible and it uses scientific method and therefore it's not subjective in and of itself.
While it cannot prove that a difference is incapable of existing somewhere/somehow by someone anymore than a law of physics can be claimed absolute and immutable as many 'laws' have been eventually proven false, but it can prove whether a given person is capable of hearing a CLAIMED difference or not. And ultimately that's what we have with golden ear audiophile claims. A person claims to be able to tell a $2000 interconnect and a $2 one and comments on how much better the $2000 one makes his music sound, but when he cannot see which cable is connected with an ABX switch, somehow that person suddenly cannot tell them apart! If they feel better owning that wire, well you or I could laugh, but that part is subjective in that placebo effects can be very real to the human experience, but it's not based on actual effects outside the brain's enjoyment of thinking it's better.
Encode a few albums in both ALAC and FLAC and compare, and get back to me. ALAC is slightly less efficient. ALAC files are larger than their FLAC counterparts, thus ALAC is worse performing. This isn't very complicated.
"Worse performing" and "less efficient" are not necessarily the same thing, which is why I questioned WTF you were talking about. If you had simply said less efficient, there would be no reply at all.
I have seen a lot of claims in the past when ALAC came out that it isn't actually "lossless" despite is name and hence the mention of a test that proves it is (i.e. encoded format in and out working, in this case DTS; you can prove it other ways like null tests, etc. as well).
And do you even understand what DTS is? If you did, you would understand IT IS LOSSY.
I'm not talking about and never was talking about DTS's lossy aspects, but rather the fact that a DTS signal encoded into ALAC (or FLAC for that matter) is a good test of whether or not they are truly lossless because if they lose ANY of the bits along the way, DTS will NOT decode PERIOD. The lossy nature of DTS has NOTHING to do with whether the codec will function if ALAC or FLAC were not truly lossless.
Anyway, regarding the various lossless codecs, you unsurprisingly completely missed the boat. ALAC is by all metrics inferior to FLAC and its only benefit is that it is supported in the Apple ecosystem.
You talk smack and like rolling eyes about missing a "boat", but your
only point that I can see is that there's slightly better file size efficiency. However, this web page, oddly enough, seems to contradict you, showing FLAC at 58.7% and ALAC at 58.5% where the lower number is better according to their table;
http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Lossless_comparison ).
The reproduced output is still the same and FLAC is useless on Apple device. Given that this is an Apple forum, I think you can imagine most of us own Apple devices so it's hardly a minor thing. FLAC is 100% useless to me. Most of the other formats listed on that page aren't supported by many consumer products and quite frankly, hard drive space is cheap enough that even if they have those ratios backwards, there's not enough difference for me to care, especially given FLAC is useless here.
Anyway, you can go ahead and store music however you want; however, I want to (a) preserve the original in a perfect manner, and (b) eliminate any possibility of generational loss from re-encoding something in lossy format more than once.
My CD collection is preserved in ALAC for backup purposes. Given there are no audible differences with a sufficient bit-rate (256kbps for AAC is plenty) and the complete inability for iTunes to maintain two otherwise identical libraries (for mobile purposes), it is not used here period anymore but simply sits on a backup drive. Only my DTS music albums are encoded in ALAC in the primary library (for meta-tagging purposes more than anything else; WAV cannot carry meta-tags).
SACD and DVD-Audio cannot be ripped/encoded in a format that allows playback on consumer devices across a network to my knowledge so any such albums would need to remain on a disc format. Both formats are/were complete commercial flops and I attest most of their sonic superiority to the quality the recordings and masterings made for them, not the medium itself (i.e. most recordings don't come close to 16-bits dynamic range and anything beyond 20 is destroyed by thermal noise so it's recording headroom only and anything above 20kHz is inaudible to human hearing so those higher sampling rates are a gimmick and nothing else).
Blu-Ray seems like a good medium for uncompressed multi-channel music. The visuals are arbitrary, but the format is well supported (unlike SACD and DVD-Audio) and the tracks could easily be ripped and stored in whatever lossless container one would want for a networked solution. So while I appreciate my Alan Parsons Quad version of Dark Side of the Moon on DVD-Audio, I'd prefer to have it in a form that I could store and playback across my network. Even DTS CDs ripped and then played back with most current players tend not to play back without a "gap" regardless of any lossless compression or WAV format so I need to keep some of the discs handy regardless.
