Comment by dlcarrier

There is a good reason to distribute it though, and compressed it doesn't really change the file size.

There's multiple YouTube channels that I listen to as podcasts, that are professionally created and the creators presume that exported audio works like studio audio, so what you end up with is really quiet audio that can't be turned up without pre-processing.

If we distributed audio the same way we work with it in a studio, we could forgo a lot of problems.

Also, the human ear does have enough dynamic range to make 24 bits worthwhile, though that much dynamic range is rarely used in recordings, and that high of a bit depth provides no benefits within a small dynamic range. A 192 kHz sample rate, on the other hand, is always useless.