ToKrCZ

In absolute numbers they will only be a drop compared to Chinese pirates, trust me.

Hopefully you checked the local laws first. I have heard that in some countries there are SWAT teams ready to go to your house once you start torrenting xDDD.

This is the way.

It is not about the price. You can buy great stuff for $500 altogether, and you can only splash $500 for one piece of a sound chain, which was not really necessary in the first place (often people buy super expensive headphones and then listen on a cheap Android phone some 128 kbps MP3s - amazing, really!). It is all about balance. Personally, I do not aim for hi-end sound equipment, but I have also heard enough of the spectrum that I know I will not be satisfied with low-end devices.

That’s why I settled for mid-tier offerings, and I am happy with my setup, knowing fully well that if anything goes bad, at least I will be able to replace it without taking a loan. After all, if you want to go hi-end, then you better have the cash to stay hi-end when necessary, and I have plenty of other hobbies to splash too much on sound.

Don’t believe anyone trying to sell you on the idea that FLAC sounds better than an appropriately compressed (read: transparent) lossy format: Opus ~128-160kbps, MP3 ‘V0’ (~215kbps), MP3 320kbps, AAC ~150kbps.

Only partly true. If the rest of the chain is of decent quality (hi-res sound card, proper cables, quality headphones/speakers/monitors), then the difference between lossless and lossy is apparent to a trained ear. Especially the lack of dynamics and space is typical of lossy formats.

Personally, I never understood why I would want to listen to anything but lossless in the first place. I never really had to worry about storage space too much for my music to consider converting it to a lossy format. I am more of a user who likes to archive stuff; therefore, lossless and FLAC are the only future-proof ways if you want to listen to your files in the next 25 years or so.

Many people I talked to said that CD’s just use mp3 codecs in the first place.

That may be partly true for non-original CDs made out of MP3 files via CD burner, but original CDs should not be “crippled” like that.

I think this debate is kind of late, at least a decade late. FLAC has clearly won; it is available everywhere and shall stay that way thanks to its open-source nature. With increasingly cheaper physical storage (SSD, HDD) and more affordable cloud storage, I think FLAC’s longevity aspect just beats everything, even though there may be other codecs such as Opus which may provide a better compression/quality ratio.

But if you only care about lossless, just go with FLAC and enjoy your tunes. ;-)