Whats the difference between lossy and lossless compression?
Lossy compression (such as Dolby Digital or DTS) is built around perceptional algorithms that remove signal data that is being masked or covered up by other signal data that is louder. Because this data is thrown away and never retrieved, it’s what’s known as “lossy”. Depending upon the source material, lossy compression can either be completely inaudible, or somewhat noticeable. It should be noted that even when it is audible, lossy compression still does a remarkable job of recovering the audio signal and still sounds quite good. Lossless compression (such as MLP) never discards any data and recovers it completely during decoding and playback.
