The FLAC file is not a luxury. It is the key to the cathedral. Without it, the raven might as well be a pigeon.
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. Steven Wilson 2013 The Raven That Refused To Sing -FLAC-
Steven Wilson is famously an audiophile purist (he remasters classic catalogues for a living). He did not hire Alan Parsons to make an album that would sound “fine” through earbuds on a subway. He built a sonic cathedral of melancholy, dynamic range, and analog warmth. The FLAC file is not a luxury