Totally confused now

[mikeinbrum]

Hi folks, apologies as this may be a long post, but I need to know opinions as the advice I've been given by Creative Audio (a shop I have previously used and found very helpful) has really confused me....

Basically, I emailed them asking for options to improve the sound I am experiencing through my NAS / SONOS / FMJ A28 / Epos M16 setup. I've been spending the last few days sticking my CDs onto the NAS in a FLAC lossless format. when i compare songs from the NAS and Sonos to the same song via my FMJ CD17, the CD player wins with ease. I wanted to know what products are in the market place to close the performance gap, thinking that maybe a seperate DAC may help. The below was their response.

***

Hi there

What you're experiencing is perfectly normal - any compression results in a big sound quality drop - there is no such thing as 'lossless', unless the CD is transcribed at full bitrate - ie nearly 1Gb per CD.

Also, you are using good quality equipment, so the difference is highlighted. Naim do a properly lossless hard drive player, but it costs £4000, because that's what it takes to do the job properly.

Best Regards

CREATIVE AUDIO

***

what makes the NAIM 'properly' lossless that I can't do myself with my cheapo NAS that has a larger capacity than the NAIM. Apologies if this is not best placed on this forum, but I thought viewers of this forum may be more familiar with NAIM or options open to me.

 

[Anonymous]

What they told you is absolute rubbish. Lossless compression gives the same quality as a CD provided that it is accurately ripped from the CD. Basically with lossless compression the original integrity of the audio file is preserved with 100% accuracy - when the lossless file is decompressed it will decompress to the original CD file. The Sonos and many other players capable of dealing with lossless files will do this every time on the fly.

Your problems may be twofold:
- your original rips may not be 100% accurate - I suggest doing a check by ripping a test track with EAC and compare the results (this will produce even better results than Naim's solution)
- the DAC in the Sonos which converts the digital signal into analogue is not as good as your CD player (most likely)

The Naim is not a great product ... it is grossly overpriced for what it is. Basically a cheapo mini PC squeezed into a Naim box. The integration of the DAC may be well executed and the whole operation may be seamless but you can do the same for a fraction of the price of the HDX with a lot more flexibility (better capacity, backup options, multiroom streaming). The Naim basically caters to the market of poorly informed, tech fearing, money to burn traditionalists for whom the Naim badge and seal of approval is more important than their ears!

The whole thing costs £4k not because it is so special but because they have spent a fortune in R&D costs on putting technology already available in the general market place for a fraction of the cost of the Naim into a Naim box of which they will not sell huge quantities (maybe even £1k per unit), then there will be a huge dealer markup and the Naim premium. The cost of the electronics is probably not more than £300.

 

[chebby]

I assume one goes for multi-room convenience/integration and the benefits of the interface/control centre rather than 'absolute quality' when choosing Sonos. Even the WHF Sonos write-up in the 2009 Ultimate Guide to New Technology states that it sounds as good as wifi can get but does not go as far as to start comparing it to the performance from a good stand-alone CD player.

I would do what you hinted at and try a DAC (at least the level of the Stello DA-100 Signature/Russ Andrews DAC-1 or above) with optical connection to an Airport Express - if you need wireless.

I am not going to get into the Naim HDX vs Lossless files & DAC argument/fire-pit. I have not heard one, cannot afford one and so it is not my business to comment. WHF love it and there have been many many favourable reviews in the other publications and online. They should be able to explain why it is worth £4500.

 

[Anonymous]

WHF and many others love it ... but have they pitched it against say a Sonos ZP90 or Apple AE feeding a very high quality DAC?

At the moment any DAC reviews particularly in computer setups seem to be restricted to budget options like the CA DACMagic or the Beresford or at other end of the spectrum with the very expensive £3k Chord.

It may be just me but it would appear that magazines do not want to test the DACs (particularly with computer based sources) that would compete in the £1k - £2k CD player market as that may be a bit too much for advertisers to bear. They may argue that manufacturers do not send such kit for review - Cyrus has a very good DAC at the £1k mark but are unlikely to want it tested with anything other than their CD players as the CD player sales may suffer.

They may also not get many items for review as many companies producing good DACs are based over the pond (Bel Canto, Bryston, Benchmark, to name a few) ... shouldn't the mags try to source such kit and test it of their own accord in order to educate the readers and give them some access to knowledge on products they could not normally get access to?

 

[mikeinbrum]

Thanks guys for your comments. I'll definitely have a look into DACs. Grimaldi, could you list a few from the manufacturers you've mentioned that will be suitable?

 

[chebby]

Grimaldi:At the moment any DAC reviews particularly in computer setups seem to be restricted to budget options like the CA DACMagic or the Beresford or at other end of the spectrum with the very expensive £3k Chord.

Not true of other mags. I have read reviews in HFN and Hifi+ in the last few months of DACs across the spectrum from the CA DacMagic, Stello DA-100 and DA-100 Signature, Benchmark DAC1 USB and DAC1 Pre, Chord (£399 Chordette & £3k QBD76) PS Audio, Beresford and others.

I know this because I have been deliberately seeking out issues with DAC reviews especially DACs that have USB

 

[Andrew Everard]

Grimaldi:WHF and many others love it ... but have they pitched it against say a Sonos ZP90 or Apple AE feeding a very high quality DAC?

At the moment any DAC reviews particularly in computer setups seem to be restricted to budget options like the CA DACMagic or the Beresford or at other end of the spectrum with the very expensive £3k Chord.

It may be just me but it would appear that magazines do not want to test the DACs (particularly with computer based sources) that would compete in the £1k - £2k CD player market as that may be a bit too much for advertisers to bear. They may argue that manufacturers do not send such kit for review - Cyrus has a very good DAC at the £1k mark but are unlikely to want it tested with anything other than their CD players as the CD player sales may suffer.

They may also not get many items for review as many companies producing good DACs are based over the pond (Bel Canto, Bryston, Benchmark, to name a few) ... shouldn't the mags try to source such kit and test it of their own accord in order to educate the readers and give them some access to knowledge on products they could not normally get access to?

Thanks for the usual conspiracy theories, Grimaldi.

Let's get a few things straight.

1) Advertisers have no influence over the content of the magazine or the ratings given to products. Full stop. No further discussion.

2) So all the magazines cover is inexpensive products like the DacMagic and Beresford and expensive models - maybe that's representative of the market as it stands in the UK at the moment? I don't know about the specific Cyrus case, but again manufacturers aren't able to dictate how products such this are handled once they're sent in for testing.

3) The US-brand products are certainly eligible for testing, provided they meet the magazine's usual distribution criteria of widespread availability in the UK. How other magazines operate I'm not sure, but we have only limited resources with which to 'source' such products, and would rather spend them on products the majority of readers can actually obtain with ease.

As I said, nice - and very familiar - conspiracy theories, but they don't hold water.

 

[Anonymous]

I'm not sure all the talk of conspiracy theories is of much help in this discussion, but I understand that Andrew has to protect WhatHiFi's reputation. What is much more interesting is the actual question of why products like the Sonos don't sound as good as a good CD player. I understand all the theory but as WhatHiFi constantly says, listen with your ears rather than just take someone else's word for it! At the Bristol Show I listened to Naim demonstrating a Mac connected to the Supernait and in my view it sounded no where near as good as the Nait 5i + CD in the next room. Any difference is always put down to the quality of the DAC but I assume the Supernait has a good DAC? I've also listened to the Sonos on a number of occasions and have yet to be impressed.

Although it makes sense for WhatHiFi to review items that we can actually buy, it seems amazing that the HiFi industry has yet to wake up to the changes consumers currently want. There is supposed to be a recession and HiFi manufactures/dealers are said to be struggling. But where are all the amplifiers in the £1K+ price range with descent DAC's built into them. If the solution to playing music stored on a NAS is a good DAC why is there such a shortage of good amps with good DAC's built in? It's not as if manufactures don't know what customers want or that they can't produce the technology. Leema has a nice amp in the Pulse and if I read it correctly they have something like 6 DAC's in their CD players. But the Pulse comes with phono support rather than a DAC and a USB port. This seems bizarre to me. It seems that only AVI is actually taking the new technology seriously. Naim's idea of over £4k for a hard disk player is a joke. It may, or may not, be good. But £4k? For those of us who have speakers we like AVI's solution is not applicable. So Leema, Naim, Arcam and the rest, isn't it time you actually produced variants of your current amps with a good DAC and USB built-in?

WhatHiFi can make a difference by doing comparitive testing of what is currently available in the UK. The Sonos + FLAC versus the Cyrus SE transport both driven into the same DAC/amp/speakers. If the theories are true there should be no difference in sound quality at all! Linn maintains that their network players are better than their CD players. Where is the testing of this? Perhaps you should get a listening panel and see if they can tell the difference in a blind test?

Going back to Mike's initial question, one magazine (I can't remember which) did a review of the a number of DAC's including PS Audio/Stello/Cyrus and concluded (if memory serves me correctly) that the Cyrus was best. The Computer Audiophile website has also reviewed a number. However, the real problem is finding a dealer in the UK where you can have a listen. Maybe it is best to add the CA DACmagic and see how it sounds. At least it is not a large outlay and can be used with your computer if you decide to get a better DAC later.

 

[chebby]

LeoL:Although it makes sense for WhatHiFi to review items that we can actually buy, it seems amazing that the HiFi industry has yet to wake up to the changes consumers currently want. There is supposed to be a recession and HiFi manufactures/dealers are said to be struggling. But where are all the amplifiers in the £1K+ price range with descent DAC's built into them.....

.....So Leema, Naim, Arcam and the rest, isn't it time you actually produced variants of your current amps with a good DAC and USB built-in?

You are joking surely?

It took Rega a decade and a half to come out with a CD player and now you expect them to have a DAC module in one of their amps? Roy Gandy would throw a fit! (And I say this as a happy consumer of theirs for the last 27 years.)

You cannot expect the hard-core 'traditional' British companies to respond to consumer trends that quickly. Too much organic 'hair shirtism'/flat-earthiness (or whatever) for three decades will not go away in a hurry. When I recently took a laptop and a DAC into my local hifi shop (part of a well known national chain) as a source with which to demo an amplifier recently, I was the first of their customers to ever do so at that branch.

When I bought my Arcam Solo-Mini earlier in the year (from the same place) I wanted to try out the rDock. Again, I was the first customer they had ever had come through the door with an iPod as a demo source. (It had an Apple Lossless 16bit/44.1khz version of a Linn Records classical download I had converted from WMA 24/96 especially for the demo.)

I should mention this hifi shop is not located in 'Lower Beardyville-on-the-Wold' but in a city of 200,000 people with a surrounding 'catchment' of another 150,000+ people and a University with 16,000 students. Shops like this, manufacturers like this, will not give up their conception that iPods/DACs/wifi/Computer based music etc belongs squarely in the pigeon hole marked 'teenager' until there has been a few more bankruptcies and take-overs.

 

[Anonymous]

Andrew,

I am not talking of conspiracies. Let me deal with each of your points in turn:

1. I don't for a minute think that advertisers have a direct impact on the contents of the mag. I also don't think that you would let an advertiser change or influence a rating. I don't believe I said anything to that effect. Please don't brand me a conspiracy loon

2. I guess my Cyrus assumption was a little conspiratorial. It is just a bit surprising not to have seen any group tests (proper ones not just 1 para reviews) subjecting this type of kit to rigorous reviews with sources such as CDPs, Airport Express, SB and Sonos. These solutions have been implemented by enthusiasts for years and are growing in numbers, yet somehow whenever they are referred to in the mags it seems like they are second best. I cannot tell a difference between my AE feeding the DAC-XP and my CD8X feeding the DAC-XP and I would like to see some reviews either confirming or denying this so others can get some help in choosing new kit and understanding that computer sourced music can be as hifi as a very expensive CD player.

I was simply trying to look at things from their point of view. If I had a great product which was fairly niche and made a lot of my other products semi obsolete I am not sure how much I would promote it. There does appear to be a gap in the market ... we can either buy cheap DACs which can be dismissed as being not quite as good as a dedicated CD player or the mega expensive DACs which are seen as great. Surely mags like WHF should be championing the needs of consumers by trying to fill those gaps.

3. I wasn't aware of such criteria and I certainly don't think its not a valid one. There is no point reviewing products which are not adequately supported however there is surely a case to be made for "educating" readers to dealing with a new way of getting the most out of music. This is perhaps linked to the problem in the UK marketplace with DACs and computer audio in the say £750-£1,500 price bracket not being well served. If mags like WHF simply ignore these products altogether how will they ever get the attention from users they may deserve. As a magazine you have the resources to do things I and many other readers can't do. You have the power to make or break a product so why not do it if you think there is a great product not currently available in the UK that is not served by the usual manufacturers ... you may give a reason to a manufacturer to bring such a product to the UK and at the same time do a good deed for your readers who without the mag would never have heard and been able to buy such a great product.

 

[Anonymous]

chebby:Grimaldi:At the moment any DAC reviews particularly in computer setups seem to be restricted to budget options like the CA DACMagic or the Beresford or at other end of the spectrum with the very expensive £3k Chord.

Not true of other mags. I have read reviews in HFN and Hifi+ in the last few months of DACs across the spectrum from the CA DacMagic, Stello DA-100 and DA-100 Signature, Benchmark DAC1 USB and DAC1 Pre, Chord (£399 Chordette & £3k QBD76) PS Audio, Beresford and others.

I know this because I have been deliberately seeking out issues with DAC reviews especially DACs that have USB

Good on you for doing your research. I would certainly do the same. Maybe I just want to see the stuff in WHF. They have by far the highest circulation (many times of all the other mags out there put together) as well as the best facilities to test in an impartial and objective manner.

 

[Anonymous]

Mikeinbrum, I would certainly try the CA DACMagic. As far as I know you could take one on trial from Richer Sounds and at £200 (or less with your WHF £10 voucher) it should be way better than the internal DAC in the Sonos if all the positive reviews are anything to go by ... and you could try it in the comfort and familiar sound surroundings of your own home doing as much A/B testing as you desire.

The Cyrus DAC-X is a great DAC from a great British company and can be had for

... but I would definitely start with the DACMagic.

 

[Andrew Everard]

Grimaldi:1. I don't for a minute think that advertisers have a direct impact on the contents of the mag. I also don't think that you would let an advertiser change or influence a rating. I don't believe I said anything to that effect.

Actually, you said:

Grimaldi:It may be just me but it would appear that magazines do not want to
test the DACs (particularly with computer based sources) that would
compete in the £1k - £2k CD player market as that may be a bit too much
for advertisers to bear.

 

[mikeinbrum]

No need to squabble please.

can we take this back to topic?

How about a WHF feature on making PC music 'hi-fi'. I'm sure it would not be only me that would find that really interesting! Maybe a mid-range DAC group test?

I visited the NAIM website to check out their marketing material for the HDX. In one of their white papers they conclude that it is possible to achieve the same results as the HDX produces if you have the relevant knowledge.... well.... perfect oppoortunity for a WHF 'how to' article. What do you say?

 

[Andrew Everard]

mikeinbrum:No need to squabble please.

Thank you for your advice on how to behave on the Forums.

I'll flag up this thread to the test team when we are all back from the Christmas/New Year break and CES the week after New Year, and see what happens...

 

[Anonymous]

chebby:LeoL:Although it makes sense for WhatHiFi to review items that we can actually buy, it seems amazing that the HiFi industry has yet to wake up to the changes consumers currently want. There is supposed to be a recession and HiFi manufactures/dealers are said to be struggling. But where are all the amplifiers in the £1K+ price range with descent DAC's built into them.....

.....So Leema, Naim, Arcam and the rest, isn't it time you actually produced variants of your current amps with a good DAC and USB built-in?

You are joking surely?

It took Rega a decade and a half to come out with a CD player and now you expect them to have a DAC module in one of their amps? Roy Gandy would throw a fit! (And I say this as a happy consumer of theirs for the last 27 years.)

You cannot expect the hard-core 'traditional' British companies to respond to consumer trends that quickly. Too much organic 'hair shirtism'/flat-earthiness (or whatever) for three decades will not go away in a hurry. When I recently took a laptop and a DAC into my local hifi shop (part of a well known national chain) as a source with which to demo an amplifier recently, I was the first of their customers to ever do so at that branch.

When I bought my Arcam Solo-Mini earlier in the year (from the same place) I wanted to try out the rDock. Again, I was the first customer they had ever had come through the door with an iPod as a demo source. (It had an Apple Lossless 16bit/44.1khz version of a Linn Records classical download I had converted from WMA 24/96 especially for the demo.)

I should mention this hifi shop is not located in 'Lower Beardyville-on-the-Wold' but in a city of 200,000 people with a surrounding 'catchment' of another 150,000+ people and a University with 16,000 students. Shops like this, manufacturers like this, will not give up their conception that iPods/DACs/wifi/Computer based music etc belongs squarely in the pigeon hole marked 'teenager' until there has been a few more bankruptcies and take-overs.

Chebby,

I've had exactly the same experience. My local hifi store informed me that I wasn't taking networked audio and video seriously if I didn't want to spend £10k plus on a proper audio/video server. However, they couldn't tell me the difference between these servers and computer servers. When I mentioned other low cost products they knew nothing about them. I recently went to an exhibition and companies there wanted a minimum of £10k for basic networked audio. They wanted to drill massive holes in my walls and re-plaster the whole house! When I asked what their product could do that I couldn't do by putting an iPod and hifi in every room, they couldn't think of anything!

But in the recession some of these companies are either going to go broke or at least lay off staff. When you read any hifi/computer audio forum you find people searching for the same products and asking the same questions over and over again. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad! It seems so simple to just take existing technology and deliver it in the way customers want. But I do agree with you that it is unlikely that the hifi manufacturers will change and the hifi dealers will go out of business if they don't protect their high margins. That is the real issue here. They are not interested in computer audio because they don't see how to make enough money out of it. But my view is that it doesn't have to be like that. If companies brought out network media players at around the £1k mark and amps with built-in DAC's for £1-1.5k I think they would do well. T&A have a network product that does everything but none of the UK magazines have reviewed it. Increasingly I find I have to turn to the Internet for such reviews. Just asking the UK companies to include an AV input on an amp seems too much for some of them!!!!

At the Excell show I asked Armour if the Myryad MI could act as a network streaming client and play Internet radio. I was told no and it would need a complete redesign. But it's a new product and costs £1300! At Bristol Arcam said they had no plans to upgrade the Solo range to do network streaming and Internet radio but for some strange reason high end AV amps can do it. When I asked Linn when they would update the Classik to include Internet Radio etc. they said they had no plans as they only consider sound quality. I have yet to get a good FM or DAB signal on anything but the BBC, but I can listen to Blues stations in the US and they sound great. And Linn is the company that now claims the network players are better than their CD players... except it appears on the Classik!

So we are all forced to add network streaming products to our hifi's and then put DAC's in between to get some descent sound quality and we're forced to buy without trying because no one wants to demo these things. It's a strange old world!!

 

[Anonymous]

Mike I know creative audio and what you have to bear in mind with them is they don't cater to the budget market, it's mostly high end hi fi. It is therefore not in their interests to talk up alternatives such as external Dacs. The Dac Magic which seems to be so highly regarded is exclusively distributed by Richer Sounds. However you need only read about lossless transfering to realise that what they have told you is false. Now that is not to say that a budget dac will outperform a higher end cd player of course not.

 

[Anonymous]

Andrew Everard:
Grimaldi:1. I don't for a minute think that advertisers have a direct impact on the contents of the mag. I also don't think that you would let an advertiser change or influence a rating. I don't believe I said anything to that effect.

Actually, you said:

Grimaldi:It may be just me but it would appear that magazines do not want to
test the DACs (particularly with computer based sources) that would
compete in the £1k - £2k CD player market as that may be a bit too much
for advertisers to bear.

That's far from saying that advertisers influence ratings given to kit or have a direct impact on what gets reviewed. Its a careful balancing act .. there would be no WHF without readers or advertisers and I would imagine that any mag editor has to take into account the interest of both groups and that these interests will influence content in some way.

Anyway good to hear Andrew that you will mention something to the review team and that we may see something in the future. I really like mikeinbrum's idea of a "how to" too. On the one hand computer hifi is a big threat to traditional manufacturers but on the other hand its a tremendous opportunity to engage the iPod generation in proper hifi.

 

[Andrew Everard]

Grimaldi:That's far from saying that advertisers influence ratings given to kit or have a direct impact on what gets reviewed. Its a careful balancing act .. there would be no WHF without readers or advertisers and I would imagine that any mag editor has to take into account the interest of both groups and that these interests will influence content in some way.

No,

Grimaldi:...as that may be a bit too much for advertisers to bear.

very much implies that the requirements of advertisers influences the choice of products for review.

Anyway, the way we work is that the magazine editor only has the interests of readers at heart.

The advertising manager worries about the advertisers, and has no influence over the editorial content of the magazine.

So no careful balancing act involved, at least on WHFSV.

Don't know how it works on other magazines...

 

[mikeinbrum]

When I first bought my SONOS kit, I thought to myself I'd just be able to run a link into my CD player to take advantage of the DAC onboard.... until i looked.... and saw there wasn't a digital input. Not knowing a great deal about hifi, I just assumed it would be there! Maybe in the future it will be.... traditional manufacturers trying to maintain market share by increasing the flexibility of 'traditional' products.

Linn DS products are marketed as offering 'better' quality than traditional CD player based rigs.... This presumably is something that we should be able to do ourselves by sourcing quality components and ripping music to a lossless format for a fraction of the cost of an integrated solution that Linn or Naim offer for mega-money. I am still surprised by Creative Audio's response to my question. I had always held them in very high regard. I remember they gave me excellent advice for my first hifi system 10 years ago.

 

[Anonymous]

There's some very interesting points being made here. The simple fact is the entire music industry is very slow to embrace the 'new' technologies and the internet. You can get fabulous sound when using a computer as a server. Audiophiles typically know what's what where compression, DAC's etc. are concerned.
Personally I stream Flac files from my Mac to a squeezebox - My Bryston BP26 DA has an excellent DAC and I let it do it's thing. The results are excellent. For a few hundred dollars (Canadian) I have added three internal 1 Tb. drives so I have plenty of room for future music.
It will be the companies who embrace the newer and much desired technologies that will make it in the future.

 

[manicm]

Um, Grimaldi, I would use the words 'total rubbish' with extreme caution here. I basically posed the same question to Linn (check the FLAC vs ALAC topic in their forums) and they simply could not give me a straightforward answer.

I'm sure Creative, being audio experts in their field, did not give their answer lightly. No-one truly knows the innards of such 'lossless' compression techniques. The closest answer I got was that, in FLAC's case anyway, is that it is based on mathematical formulas but in almost all cases extrapolation is involved. And when there is extrapolation involved no-one is gonna tell me it's perfect cos I'll laugh uncontrollably in their face. However I will never question the audio quality of FLAC or ALAC or others cos it does sound CD-perfect in a lot of cases.

But to me 'lossless compression' is an oxymoron and stretches semantics a bit. The term has always confused me.

While I in no way detract from the new digital wave in hifi, Naim probably have a point to make in their HDX player. And irrespective of cost by all reviews I've read it is a spectacular point they've made.

And if you think 4k is steep well how much do you think Linn asks for their very first streaming player, the Linn Klimax DS??? I can tell you it was multiple times the cost of the Naim, you'll jump off a cliff, we masses simply cannot afford it. And yes, they also made their spectacular point with it.

And finally, I'm gonna get shot for saying this, but things like AccurateRip are by and large superfluous. Oh it might tell you you've got a 100% accurate rip, well so what??? It won't guarantee audio quality or characteristics that your ears will be satisfied with.

Anyway to give the Sonos owner the best shot - well try a good DAC, I would say something above the DACMagic, the sound will improve. But Sonos being a wireless solution is always going to be a limiting factor.

 

[mikeinbrum]

Can you explain why a wireless solution is limiting?

 

[chebby]

manicm:But to me 'lossless compression' is an oxymoron and stretches semantics a bit. The term has always confused me.

If you have a form of compression that (when replayed) faithfully reproduces every single bit that was on the original, then it is lossless compression.

Furthermore, if the error correction has all been done at the time of ripping (and not 'on the fly' like with CD players) then it is conceivable that a bit-perfect - or at the very least pre-corrected - music file will sound better.

A CD player does not always get all the time it needs to correct errors. It is limited by the fact that it has to present a bitstream to the DAC in real-time at the demand of a clock. So if some disks contain more errors, then the error correction algorithms just have to deal with it as best they can or not at all. When ripping to a computer, losslessly (with correction switched on) I have seen write speeds vary all the way down to 0.4X whilst the software takes as much time as is necessary to get it right.

 

[ianandyr]

manicm:But to me 'lossless compression' is an oxymoron and stretches semantics a bit. The term has always confused me.

It's simple enough. Here's an example.

Imagine a paragraph with the sentence 'A quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog's back' repeated, say 10 times, replacing the word lazy in each case with a different adjective to get 10 different sentences. You are going to have 500 characters or so. To compress this I can represent exactly the same information 'mathematically' using far fewer characters by replacing the repeated characters with a token and substituting that repeated text for the much shorter token 9 of the 10 times. When I uncompress the file I simply reverse the process to get back to a perfect copy of the original.

The term lossless compression is not in any way an oxymoron and can apply to text, music, video or indeed any form of data that contains redundancy.

There are lots of lossy compression techniques out there, mp3 being the best known example, which achieve much higher rates of compression than lossless compression techniques. They do this by tossing away information not thought to dramatically impact the overall listener perception of sound quality. FLAC/ALAC are however lossless. If you uncompress a file encoded in either of these formats you will find you have a bit perfect copy of the original WAV file.