Apple Lossless Encoder - Audiophile Quality?

The only reason to go with any of the lossless compressed formats is hard disk space considerations. With the cost of large hard drives ever plummeting is that really a compelling reason to go that route?

Disk is cheap. Why compress 50%? Many of my customers have told me that AL and even FLAC changes the sound. Besides, you have a "true master" if it .wav and you can convert to anything you want later.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio

Wdrazek- I haven't backed up yet. Procrastinating as usual. My drive is less than two months old so that's probably driving my complacency. I have to re-format my old drive to back up the files- hence the laziness...

Scrith- thanks for taking that. I couldn't have worded it as well. I'm not sure I agree that you will be tied to Apple hardware/software until the end of time if you go Apple lossless. I run itunes in xp to rip and sonos reads the files. Slim Devices and others also support Apple lossless.

Yes, you have to beware of proprietary formats, but Apple's are becoming so dominant mfr's will be making compatible gear for a long, long time if they want to stay in business. The added perk that you CAN play it in itunes and sync to your ipod and easily share with all the other Apple users out there is not a small deal...

Programmers say quite definitively that AL is the EXACT same file when uncompressed as the "true master". If it sounds different to some, it is either in their head or in the way the gear is decoding the file.

And disk space still isn't cheap enough for me!

I don't understand the paranoia around lossless formats sounding different / worse either. And, yes, drive space is cheap, but it's not free, backups take time, all disk activity takes time, and there is no cost to using a lossless format. With WAV not supporting tag info, there is both a real cost and a logical cost to going with the uncompressed format. I don't get it.