One of the problems with lossy files, files that lose information in the act of compressing and making them smaller, is that the information—once lost—is lost forever. Technology simply has no way to retrieve data that's been thrown out.
But what of data that was never captured in the first place? Like losses when re-mastering a track?
There are no perfect transfers of data, something's always lost in translation.
One of my readers suggested the ultimate loss of data: recordings.
When a recording engineer attempts to capture a live musical event not everything is kept. Spatial cues from the three dimensional space are lost, as are a number of other elements recording technologies cannot keep up with.
Original monophonic recordings lost a lot and in the same way two-dimensional photography still does. Just look at the difference between a flat photo and a stereoscopic version to see my point. A hologram's even a step closer.
Once lost that data can sometimes be inferred, but never replicated.
There's no excuse for lossy formats anymore, and we should be careful about supporting audio formats that are not carbon copies of the original.
