An MP3 (even at 320 kbps) truncates those decays. It turns the ghost into a skeleton. The high-frequency sheen of Travis’s flute in "The Watchmaker" becomes brittle. The low-end rumble of the Mellotron loses its organic warble. You hear the notes , but you lose the breath . FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is not about “better highs and lows.” It is about bit-perfect reconstruction . When you listen to the 24-bit/96kHz FLAC version of The Raven That Refused to Sing , you are hearing the exact digital snapshot of the analog tape master before it was downsampled for CD.
If you own the CD, you have 16-bit/44.1kHz PCM—which is excellent. But seek out the 24-bit FLAC release. On a revealing system, the difference is not subtle. It is the difference between reading about a ghost and seeing one. Steven Wilson 2013 The Raven That Refused To Sing -FLAC-
In the pantheon of modern progressive rock, few albums carry the weight of deliberate, aching craftsmanship like Steven Wilson’s 2013 masterpiece, The Raven That Refused to Sing (And Other Stories) . But to discuss this album is to immediately confront a technical and philosophical question: why does the mere mention of the album among audiophiles so often include the suffix “-FLAC”? An MP3 (even at 320 kbps) truncates those decays