Introduction

Take these two side-by-side images of The Great Wave off Kanagawa: One of them has the resolution 3858x2592 pixels, the other 1929x1296 pixels (scaled back up to 3858x2592 for comparison). Can you tell them apart?

I can't. If you can, I bet you have to look really close to notice a difference. If I take a 12x12 sample of each's bottom-left corner (and scale it up), you cal tell the difference: The left side has the lower resolution.

In contrast, if I tweak the color profile just a bit: You can immediately tell the difference.

Audiophilia

An audiophile has a committed interest in high-quality audio. Simple enough. We call the reproduction of sound with less distortion “higher fidelity.” Ostensibly, the higher fidelity, the better.

Audio codings come in lossless (e.g. FLAC) and lossy (e.g. MP3) formats. Lossless codings reproduce sound exactly as originally recorded; they have the highest fidelity, usually at the cost of larger files that take longer to encode and decode.

Notice how I separate high-quality audio and high-fidelity audio. While some people can differentiate between high-quality lossy and lossless files, they often blindly prefer the lossy version. Also, the final fidelity we experience as listeners often “is less dependent on the specifications of the recording or delivery format and far more dependent on the skill of the recording engineer, the sensitivity of the producer, and the desire of the record label to maintain the best fidelity possible through the production and distribution phases of a release." Cynically, it seems a lot of high-fidelity audio comes down to more marketing than substance anyway.

I've done an ABX test before, and only by focusing really intensely through my headphones could I tell some difference. I don't normally listen to music with focus intense enough to tell that difference. To me, then, lossless formats serve better to preserve audio than make it “sound better."

Conclusion

As I implied through the introduction. I find only the “profile,” not the resolution, of your audio matters in practice. For example, do your speakers emphasize bass to your liking? Do your headphones have noise canceling? Modern lossy audio codings do an amazing job, even to trained ears and top-of-the-line headphones, because scores of researchers and engineers are doing their job well. Therefore, you can divert your attention away from pedantic specs and toward what actually sounds good to you.