I’d always rather have the highest quality available. I’m gonna convert it down again to get my music to all fit on my phone. But I’ve got fast internet and external storage is a commodity in 2023, a 2TB hard drive can be found for around $60 USD, and aside from my ears (which are by no means golden but are definitely sensitive) preferring the higher quality I also believe VERY strongly in media archival, especially artwork in digital formats like music. So hell, I’d prefer a .wav to any kind of lossless compression given the options, purely for the sake of having it
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320kbps is my preferred quality. It’s high enough that the song sounds good to me, and it doesn’t hog a massive amount of space on the computer I use to do all my work. FLAC doesn’t sound any better to me so I always convert down to save space.
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I prefer to rip to .wav or FLAC because of archival reasons, but the latter is actually better for the built-in checksum and better metadata support. All I keep locally are physical vk releases I can’t stream, and storage is cheap. Over the next decade-or-so, we’ll probably think nothing of storing lossless files as we get into the tens of terabytes on smaller solid-state storage mediums.
If we’re talking just about sound quality, even as you get to a Susvara or LCD-5 with a high-end stack, I still think the 192-320kbps range is still perfectly acceptable. Honestly, 192kbps is very underrated and unappreciated and shows off how well audio scales with the signal chain vs just going from 192 to lossless.
Also, if we’re just talking about visual kei, or even a good chunk of “busy” rock/metal genres with electronic elements (not something like Plini 
), they don’t sound particularly great with anything but really colored gear with a bass-boosted or v-shaped signature.
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To be pedantic about this for a second, I don’t desire lossless rips as much as I desire bit perfect copies of the CD. Lossless rips are just a way of storing compressed versions of exactly that. I want my rips to play back exactly the way it was stored on the CD. If there’s no silence between two tracks, I want that. If the transition between two songs are very specific, I want that (two examples are G.A.L.D → Revolver Blast by DELUHI and attempted suicide → alter by Nega). If you have EAC logs then that’s great! And I wrote elsewhere on the forum that there are certain formats, such as HDCD and SACD, which may require extra steps to get all the information off of the medium. I also want that.
I have a 10 TB hard drive external so space means nothing to me. I also convert everything down to 192 kbps AAC while on the go in order to fit everything onto my iPod. The way I see it, I’m living the best of both worlds.
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That’s a really insightful response!
I tend to rip my CD’s as 320kbps mp3 mainly due to me wanting to have all my music on my phone. WAV/FLAC files take up way too much storage
I like to look for old visual kei songs and convert them to lossless files, because there are too many poor 128kbps sound quality on the Internet (it’s a pity to hear them), or the songs and song titles are incorrect, and Many rare songs are not available online. It’s a pity.
Although the 320kbps sound quality and m4a sound quality sound close to lossless, there are discontinuous parts when listening to the second track. Unless the 128kbps sound quality sounds like lossless, I would still give priority to lossless sound quality.
remember HDCD and SACD are snake oil
that HDCD rip of Macrabre turned out to be nothing more than regular 16/44.1 copy on the normal cd. although SACDs can have official 24bit audio, but theres also a chance of it just being upscaled 16bit. Dredg’s El Cielo might be one of these cases. i still need to rip the vinyl in DSD and compare the two, for science!
nothing should be seen as a perfect copy of a recording unless you have the masters. even a 100% log isn’t seen as a perfect copy, but a copy that is as close to the original as possible.
also my guy over here ruining his ears with 192kbp 
convert them to lossless??? please tell me you dont take a MP3 and convert it to FLAC. doing that doesnt do anything because there was already a loss turning it into an mp3. think of it like a cup filled with liquid. the conversion process poured liquid down the drain to fit it in a smaller cup. you cant use the liquid in the smaller cup to fill the larger cup. once you convert a song that was originally WAV/FLAC/ALAC/AIFF/PCM/DFF/DSF to anything other than those formats you’re going to lose information and will never get it back.
M4A is a file container, it does not have anything to do with audio quality. an AAC and ALAC file can both be M4A.
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There seems to be a lot of misconceptions in the music community regarding the differences between 320kbps mp3 and FLAC format. It is true that 320kbps is technically as good as FLAC, but there are other reasons to get music in a lossless format.
Hearing the difference now isn’t the reason to encode to FLAC. FLAC uses lossless compression, while MP3 is ‘lossy’. What this means is that for each year the MP3 sits on your hard drive, it will lose roughly 12kbps, assuming you have SATA - it’s about 15kbps on IDE, but only 7kbps on SCSI, due to rotational velocidensity. You don’t want to know how much worse it is on CD-ROM or other optical media.
I started collecting MP3s in about 2001, and if I try to play any of the tracks I downloaded back then, even the stuff I grabbed at 320kbps, they just sound like crap. The bass is terrible, the midrange…well don’t get me started. Some of those albums have degraded down to 32 or even 16kbps. FLAC rips from the same period still sound great, even if they weren’t stored correctly, in a cool, dry place. Seriously, stick to FLAC, you may not be able to hear the difference now, but in a year or two, you’ll be glad you did.
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^wait, isn’t that a copypasta from reddit that made fun of audiophiles? Because I doubt that’s how digital data (lossy or not) actually works, lol.
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Just a lossless fan <3
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The best compromise to quality and files size is m4a VBR lossy. if you have the space for it then FLAC lossless.
It’s not the file size that’s important but the way you use it 
I’m sorry. I have nothing else substantial to add except this entendre.
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Oh god I remember this copypasta. And everybody thinking that this is actually what lossy means and what bitrot is lmaooo
I simp flac
flac is love
flac is life
Quality in lossless always will matter <3 and size not really nowadays!
File size matters for the local library I keep on my phone since manufacturers are taking away expandable storage, yes.
I understand preference for FLAC, but lossy formats still have their utility. I’ll always encourage people to actually buy the release if lossless is so important to them, rather than pestering people generous enough to share their collection in the first place 
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I think this is the last problem that we are tryin to fix. Everything is getting to cloud and so on, i dont like. Maybe the manufacturers want phones with less expandable storage to avoid many production/environmental issues and focusing in cloud storage services.