What engineering effort did developers stop prioritizing perfectly when designing lossy codecs?

Answer

Perfectly recreating the source audio

A fundamental shift occurred when engineers realized that striving for perfect fidelity was inefficient and unnecessary for consumer use. The true innovation in formats like MP3 was accepting a controlled loss of data by designing algorithms around the limitations of human perception. Instead of trying to flawlessly reproduce every nuance of the original sound wave, the focus shifted to intelligently discarding information that the ear would not register, prioritizing data size reduction over absolute acoustic perfection.

What engineering effort did developers stop prioritizing perfectly when designing lossy codecs?
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