It's audible in the sense that it exists completely in an audio modality.
But it's not audible in the sense that human ears can't discern it.
But it's not audible in the sense that human ears can't discern it.
If an audio signal survives a lossy compression algorithm, then there are two possibilities:
- the compression algorithm should be improved, as it preserves some data that isn't important to the human ear
- the signal is audible
It's information theory. Either you can encode additional information without impacting the result, in which case the compression algorithm could use it to be more efficient, or you can't. TANSTAAFL.
There is an obvious third choice: the gain in compression isn't worth the effort of writing code to detect these non-discernible artifacts.
People are throwing around 0.2 bits/second in this thread. I doubt a company or individual would write code for such a trivial gain, never mind the slowdown in encoding it might cause.
Why wouldn’t it be worth it? You just have to write the code once and it will affect terabytes of music being compressed from that point forth.