Lossless

Preserving every part of the original information through encoding or transformation.

Reach for it when making a technical claim about exact recoverability rather than merely high perceived quality

The archive stores a lossless audio master before creating smaller listening copies.

• playful

  full-fidelity

  product language emphasizes preservation of detail

  not when Full-fidelity is a loose quality phrase, not proof of mathematically lossless recovery.

• everyday

  exact

  identity with the original is the only point readers need

  not when Exact is vague unless the compared representation and criterion are named.

• warm

  faithful

  the reproduction preserves the source's important character

  not when A faithful copy may accept tiny changes and therefore need not be lossless.

• professional

  bit-perfect

  digital output matches the source bit for bit

  not when Bit-perfect concerns one transfer or playback path, not every property of a format.

• professional

  uncompressed

  data remains in its direct expanded representation

  not when Uncompressed files can still be altered or incomplete, and lossless compression is possible.

• formal

  reversible

  a transformation can be undone to recover the starting state

  not when Reversibility may depend on saved metadata and is broader than information encoding.

• lossy
• degraded
• incomplete
• altered

• lossless compression

  Lossless compression reduced storage use without changing a single decoded value.

• lossless format

  The preservation team chose a lossless format with broad software support.

• lossless audio

  Lossless audio retained the full master for future remastering.