Reply To: Luddite Geeks
For me, the advantage of FLAC isn’t that I can hear better quality; it’s that I can process the tracks further without introducing any needless distortion. I can burn audio CDs from FLAC, then rip those CDs to FLAC, and I should be exactly where I started. For listening through cheap headphones, mp3 is just as good, but starting from FLAC allows me to use whatever lossy codec I like: mp3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis. If I have a collection of lossy-encoded files, and I want to transcode them to a different format, I would expect some degree of distortion. For me, the advantage of FLAC over Apple Lossless is that FLAC is more widely supported by a variety of (free) software tools.