!It’s a common misconception to measure expected audio quality in terms of bitrate. Intuitively, it seems as if more data will mean higher quality, but this isn’t always the case. The trouble with lossless codecs is that they’re very inefficient — even a compressed lossless format like FLAC or ALAC is generally encoding things that humans simply cannot hear.
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People don’t seem to have a problem with this when it comes to pictures. Nobody says “I won’t look at a website unless all the images are TIFF files”, because that’s plainly ridiculous. We’ve all seen badly compressed images on the Internet, and we’ve all seen beautiful ones too. We understand that “what it looks like” is the reliable measure of, well, what it looks like.”
A good discussion of music compression, and the fallacy of thinking that bigger is better.
However, in his footnote, Mr. Doe makes a fundamental error; just because there are higher frequencies in high-resolution music files doesn’t mean that a dog will think they sound better. They will certainly have more audible frequencies, but it’s a truly subjective thing, from the canine point of view, whether those frequencies are desirable, and whether they improve the music.