[runeks]

Have you honestly done a blinded listening test, comparing 320 kbps Ogg Vorbis (Spotify Premium) to lossless, and concluded that there's a severe reduction in quality?

Audio compression is an old technology by now. Lossless CD audio is ~1200 kbps, and we're only compressing to something like 1/4th the original size. There really shouldn't be much room for error. Even completely lossless CD audio compression can still get to ~50%-ish of the original data rate.

Imagine if you had H.264 video at 50% the data rate of a completely lossless signal. That would be completely perfect.

And if you're listening on a speaker setup, your room will distort the sound orders of magnitude more than compressing an audio signal 4x will.

[pimeys]

When I get my music, I want to use that for the next 20 years at least. It's stored in my NAS lossless and I can convert it to any format I want? For example, I use 192kbps opus files on my phone, which work nice while using A2DP to pack the sound even more.

But if I own music, FLAC is the proper format. I can go into any other format from it and re-pack my whole collection in the matter of minutes. Buying and storing content in lossy format doesn't give me this freedom.

And even if Spotify Vorbis sounds ok, it doesn't change the fact that many records in there have a very bad mastering and no other versions at all. Which was my original point here.