Consistently, maybe not. But I have a few songs in my library that, despite 256kbps bitrate, have half-second encoding artefacts (i.e., maybe six seconds in som

Consistently, maybe not. But I have a few songs in my library that, despite 256kbps bitrate, have half-second encoding artefacts (i.e., maybe six seconds in some 80+ hours collection) that always made me go "whoa, why does my speaker sound funny? …oh, it's that song again" until I canned them – I had them both as MP3 and FLAC in my library due to just importing everything on my HDD. After I wasted time checking speaker cables for the fifth time, I just deleted the MP3 versions. With FLAC/PCM you simply don't have any "is the bitrate sufficient? Is there no encoder nor decoder bug that introduces artefacts despite sufficient bitrate?" questions, which for me is worth the increased storage requirements.