I've listened to many of the lovetown boots. I was less than impressed with the quality. As for the Point Depot recording you referred me to, that was never released in lossless. I pretty much don't listen to anything unless it's in lossless these days.
That Point Depot recording from the Complete U2 is difficult to get ahold of now, since the Complete U2 no longer exists(and even when it did, the show was album only meaning you had to shell out the money for all the albums you already had just to get it). If anyone has it, I'd love to have it. I started a request thread in 'Music On The Internet' days ago but got no response. Though it should be noted that the AIWIY in that show is, for some reason, abbreviated, and is less than two minutes long.
Yeah, it only ever existed, officially, as a crappy DRM iTunes download...and 128kbps at that. Unless you bought The Complete U2, you've got a crappy lossy encode of a crappy lossy encode. In that case, it wouldn't take much to hear a diff in sound quality between that and lossless. I do have it, but to be honest it's not a much better listening experience overall than the readily available boot of that show.
On this lossless thing, the vast, vast majority of the population, even so-called audiophiles who insist they can tell the difference, actually can't tell the difference between a high quality (256kbps or better) MP3 or AAC file and a lossless one in A/B tests. Most people can't tell the diff at 192kbps for that matter. A simple Google search will show this has been demonstrated again, and again, and again. The best most people get starting at 192 is 50%...which is what you'd just get from guessing between two samples anyway. That's just a fact. That won't stop people from insisting that they are among the tiny percent of the population gifted with the right ears and right equipment from insisting they can tell the difference. And indeed, a small percent of the population can, given the right sample and equipment, or someone who has very good ears and knows what to listen for. But anyone who says they can tell the difference without doing a genuine, A/B blind test is fooling themselves.
Don't get me wrong...I have a lossless (ALAC) backup of all my music, which I then re-encode to 256kbps AAC. But I won't pretend I can tell the difference. So if you're avoiding live U2 because you'll only listen to lossless music, you're missing a lot of great stuff. In any event, there's a lot of live U2 available in mastered, lossless quality from the concert DVD's. And it's not like all the studio U2 records are reference-qaulity masters...look at Bomb, which is brickwalled to hell and sounds like shit.
Probably > 80% of the time I listen to U2, I listen to their live stuff. Larry was right: live is where they live.
More like 90%+ in my case. Larry is right (of course). And when I do vote (only in the close ones), I deliberately make the choice to vote for the studio version, even if I may prefer the live version. Others have their own criteria.
Good for them I say.
