> > 192Kb/s AC3 is very lossy indeed > > Can you successfully ABX 192kB/s AC3 versus lossless?
that's not really the point when you're dealing with preservation
moreso when you can have data encoded in there.
lossy techniques have their own artefacts and general signatures in the signal, audible or not, you don't want them building up. they're specifically designed to NOT represent the data, but represent what they think a person can hear and throw other bits away.
what the human ear can / can't hear is irrelevant here, best possible representation of data that was captured, and no user created artefacts etc. is key.
If you're analyzing a captured stream and the encoding has thrown away / changed data because it thinks you won't be able to hear the difference then you don't get a good idea of the actual capture capability from the data.
It's likely for a lot of these we're approaching the point where there's going to be one real chance to do them properly, before they rot too much. When presented with such a scenario you don't capture stuff only to throw bits of it away, you get what you can, while you can and store that for future generations.
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