GREAT!
I have cognitive dissonance.
There are many interesting thoughts.
I need time to think about it.
I have a question for you. Do you listen to stereo music?
And yes, I am now satisfied with our discussion and grateful to all who are involved.
I actually appreciate everyone who has posted in this thread.
I think another way of interpreting Gregorio's response to you about the lossy codecs. I want to share some thoughts, everyone here has been amazing so far.
These are my thoughts after doing lots of reading and I am not trying to disqualify what you are hearing but wanted to explain some things.
AAC has been developed for decades.
I've posted some screenshots below.
Greg has mentioned to you about international standards. Sony owns record studios and has a huge incentive to pour resources into AAC, Fraunhofer, Dolby, Nokia, Panasonic are some big names. These companies/organizations have a huge incentive to making AAC have a level of quality and perform very well.
ISO is an international organization that publishes standards.
Why are standards important? In networking world, network devices routers, switches, cables are all standards set by international organizations so that they can interoperate and work with each other regardless of brand because the underlying technology follows a standard.
While I am not a sound engineer or an expert in developing psychoacoustic models. LAME MP3 and AAC have gone through tremendous development in 1990s and 2000s and beyond. Public Listening tests on HydrogenAudio show QuickTime Apple AAC doing very well at bitrates like 128 and 160 kbps. FhG (fraunhofers version of AAC) and Nero AAC do pretty good but from a consensus qaac/Apple QuickTime AAC seems to be very good for most problem samples or artifacts. Bigshot himself mentioned it being audibly transparent for them at 192 or 256 VBR.
One more thing I forgot to note! About international Standards, AAC low complexity can be played back by any device/software that supports AAC-LC, whether it's encoded by fraunhofer, Nero AAC, Apple aac. The aac-lc should play back, even on Android it should playback. So that's a good thing about standards.
Recently Xiph Opus is the hot new lossy audio codec where people have been finding transparency at 64 and 128 kbps.
I inquired Gregorio and they let me know back in 90s they listened to LAME mp3 and found it transparent at 160 kbps even. A lot of work has been done developing these psychoacoustic models to achieve a certain level of quality that hopefully everyone can enjoy.
Also what Angelom mentioned as well and others about LDAC not being a lossless codec is right on the dot. LDAC is still compressing audio data but there is a very high level of confidence that it would sound audibly transparent from the audio source (CD, FLAC ripped from CD, etc.)
However, from the dicussions about online store transcoding, different masterings, same mastering, I just recognized also basically putting faith that the online stores where I bought flacs from either gotten it from a lossless audio source or the record company/publishing provided a lossless source, there could be that they could have converted mp3 to flac. (Can't know for sure unless we RIP from the cd ourselves). I wasn't there to watch where these stores get their lossless audio files from.
Some other thoughts are since I wasn't at the music studio at the time of recording, I have no idea what it sounded like in the studio.
But anyhow, I don't want to discourage you from utilizing LDAC. A lot on here resonate that pretty much all BT audio codecs should sound pretty good to a degree at minimum or audibly transparent with the exception that AAC could not play well on Android devices due to either not following a standard or some sort out of my knowledge. I plan to encode opus or lame mp3 to my phone for listening and have it utilized either by Bluetooth headphones or iems or something.
From what I know, as well as looking at Sony's battery life utilizing LDAC significantly reduces the battery life of earbuds.