Flac file or Wav file albums

I know a chap who spent £200k on his hifi. He's a pretty well known audiophile. When a manufacturer releases a new piece of kit for example, they normally send him a personally branded one as a gift so that he can audition it. Sennheiser made him a one off pair of walnut wood headphones for his birthday last year. Anyway, I digress.

He has been Flac only for nearly fifteen years now. (Used to pay £1k for 16GB of storage back then!).

Anyway, he set up a blind comparison for me when I first met him. I could tell a difference between Flac and 256kbps MP3 but it was extremely subtle.

To put it into context, I could hear a bigger difference when he bypassed his dual mains filters. You're going to need one hell of a rig to make it worthwhile.

If I spent £200k on my hifi I'd want it to include a country house to store it in ;)

I switched to AIFF a few years back for bedroom DJ'ing (techno, ambient) and definitely noticed the difference compared to 128-196kbps MP3. I'm forced to use ALAC for music on the go (iPhone + portable DAC). I imagine the difference is far less marked with higher bit rate MP3s but with any lossless format I just know that I'm not listening to compressed music so I can concentrate on whatever else I'm doing at the time. My brain is far more sensitive / less tolerant to background noise and audio distractions than it used to be; when I work in co-working spaces I use noise isolating earplugs. So moving away from MP3s has a psychological benefit rather than an auditory one :) And anyway, how else can I justify buying new hifi equipment? :p

a pretty well known audiophile

Stores I've used that sell FLACS - Juno Donwnload, beatport (sometimes), 7-digital, bandcamp (sometimes)...

yeah for djing or production or anything that involves warping, lossless is definitely the way to go. 192kbps and below is pretty rancid but I totally get the distraction thing - you can focus on the music rather than trying to zero in on potential compression artifacts.

mp3 is long dead anyways
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-mp3-is-officially-dead-after-its-creators-abandoned-it
hi-res is new fad. All my recent bandcamp FLAC purchases 24 bit now. Tidal pushing they “master quality” premium subscription services

Storage is cheap nowadays.

I ripped everything to FLAC to avoid the repeating scenario where I ripped everything to low bitrate mp3 in the early 2000s and had to rip/download everything again as stuff improved.

Now I know I have the lossless files so converting to mp3, etc is just a matter of a big batch conversion which doesn't need any input.