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choice, choice, choice. That will win over quality.
As for compression, there are two very different types of compression that exist when talking about music. We're talking about data compression, but there also is signal compression.
Signal compression is a technique used (to great effect I might add) to squeeze the maximum amount of sound on a medium without clipping (distortion). The specifics have changed somewhat between analog and digital, but in broad strokes you have electronics that will see a peak and squash it down. This allows you to make things sound louder and get an even mix. In extreme use you get breathing and pumping effects. EVERY commercial recording you hear has audio compression. It is ubiquitous. There are other tricks you can play with it (like ducking...where a voice is talking over music and the music automatically drops in level when the voice comes in). In addition, analog compression (with tasty tube circuits) impart a "warmth" to the signal, along with a bit of distortion. This distortion, made up of even harmonics, actually is somewhat pleasing to the human ear, and is also quite common in commercial recordings.
Digital is different, and any distortion is bad...ugly odd harmonics that sound terrible. In analog recording, it is common to run levels a bit hot (into the red) to get some natural compression and warmth. In digital, you absolutely do not want to go into the red, insteal tending to run about -10db. You get a great clean signal, but miss the warmth. Enter digital trickery to simulate the analog distortion/compression.
ok, thats for the music. Now when you take that and prepare it for someone to listen to it, you end up compressing the file because hirez audio files can be very large (too big for cd). In that case you have a number of different comporession algorithms you can use, but you are essentially throwing away data to approximate what the original signal looked like. The more data you throw away, the poorer the sound. There are plenty of sophisticated tricks that you can play but lossy compression is lossy compression. AAC is Apples compressions scheme, and it sound better than MP3. There are other compression algorithms out there, and they tend to get better as we get more computing horsepower.
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