@gpittman I am glad for the long answer. Interesting to understand the “why” for things. Anyhow, you can think about FLAC, and other lossless compression formats, like a zip compressed file. A zip is lossless and compressed. When you unzip it has to be exactly as it was before being zipped or the contents would no longer function/execute/whatever. Have you done blind comparisons between the formats? Could be differences between the audio libraries/apps that handle the formats I guess.