[soundwave106]

What I will say about lossy MP3 audio is that in a blind ABX style test, I imagine I would not be able to point out which is which if the bitrate is high enough. However, if you play the lossy audio and lossless audio back to back in a good critical listening environment, there will often be small detectable differences between the two.

The difference is usually very, very subtle (my description for it is "soundstage differences", like slight differences in audio imaging) and if you are in the situation you are 99% of the time where you are not in a critical listening environment, you probably won't be able to even hear this. But if you are absolutely gung-ho about preserving the full spectrum of the recording, MP3 won't work. It's not an archival format by design.