MusicallyInspired wrote:Basically, this image sums things up perfectly
I prefer the before mix picture (the girl)... For me a good visual analogy is something like a h.264 deblocking filter, or those wavelet codecs that make the picture look "plastic" without sparkle for a lack of an objective term. Some of this effect is already present in a "mastered" photograph, where for example a woman's skin was airbrushed.
I've noticed that from mid 1990's onwards music increasingly often had a "watery", rolling quality to it, even when MP3 isn't involved (possibly due to ultramaximizing, or maybe due to processing that alters the phase). Earlier sound from the 80s was usually "hard", localized in space. I want to use lossless for these more recent records to remove doubts that what I'm hearing could be a codec artifact.