But that’s the exact issue that this entire article is missing! It’s all about peculiarities of the codec! The issue at hand is apple selling 24bit/192kHz ver

But that’s the exact issue that this entire article is missing! It’s all about peculiarities of the codec! The issue at hand is apple selling 24bit/192kHz versions of lossy AAC compressed files, compared to 16bit/44.1kHz versions of AAC files. And the issue I was comparing with video was the same – with video, codecs enforce Chroma Subsampling, where the resolution for color is half that of the actual imagery. In the same way, AAC and mp3 heavily reduce the bandwidth for the upper half of the frequency spectrum, spending like 90% of their available bandwidth on the lower half (with 44.1kHz, they prioritize the range between 4 and 8kHz, specifically, where speech is). The entire topic is if using a codec that specifically cuts away the lower and upper parts of the frequency spectrum, increasing the frequency spectrum can improve quality. And yes, it does. Apple is selling AAC, not WAV. Which makes the entire article useless. Yes, we should all focus on replacing 16bit/44.1kHz AAC with 16bit/44.1kHz FLAC instead of 24bit/192kHz AAC, and we all should focus on replacing 4:2:0 1080p mp4 with 4:4:4 1080p mp4 instead of 4:2:0 4K mp4 (the chroma subsampling issue I mentioned). But that’s not the reality we live in, and given the choice between 16bit/44.1kHz AAC and 24bit/192kHz AAC, I’ll choose the second.