[lowbloodsugar]

All this talk about how compression is just as good as lossless appears to be based on the idea that "we know how the brain perceives sound, so we can remove the bits you can't perceive".

And yet when I google "do all humans perceive sound the same way" the overwhelming response is that, no, humans do not perceive sound the same way. So how can compression work equally well for everyone?

As an audiophile, why risk it?

For myself, I've got Meridian processor and speakers and I can for sure tell the difference. Can I tell the difference when it's playing on a bluetooth speaker? Not so much.

Does it make a difference for AirPods. On the one hand, the AirPods will recompress to AAC, so you get compressed audio anyway. But if the source material is compressed in some other format, then it will have lost information, while recompressing it for AAC will lose different information. So if you have AirPods then you really want lossless to start with: that way you'll only have the AAC losses.