> We recommend that, for serious listening, our readers use uncompressed audio file formats, such as WAV or AIF—or, if file size is an issue because of limited hard-drive space, use a lossless format such as FLAC or ALC.
I recommend that, for serious listening (for some weird definition of "serious"), go to a music concert. PCM is also a lossy compression due to the quantization step, albeit its effect is much less pronounced for so many reasons that no one even thinks it as a "compression" method. If you can tolerate PCM, you should be also able to accept some good enough lossy codecs---I don't know if that includes MP3 or AAC or Vorbis or Opus or whatever, though.
I recommend that, for serious listening (for some weird definition of "serious"), go to a music concert. PCM is also a lossy compression due to the quantization step, albeit its effect is much less pronounced for so many reasons that no one even thinks it as a "compression" method. If you can tolerate PCM, you should be also able to accept some good enough lossy codecs---I don't know if that includes MP3 or AAC or Vorbis or Opus or whatever, though.