21/08/2025
MP3 breaks the spectrum up into 24 bands and removes adjacent bands of sound that are hard to detect due to the loudness of the band next door. How much it does this and at what but rate was able to be determined by the person encoding the audio.
So not lossless. And in an ERA where bandwidths were very low it was an important step forward for streaming.
Like all technology, the constraints have changed over 40 years and so new lossless or near lossless solutions are now possible. As well as better ways to encode and decode at single bit depth.
CDs also had their limitations in the early days and are much better now.
96kHz 24bit audio is better again and more we are now routinely seeing 32bit on the recording side.
