... WAV files give you 100% of the original lossy [sic!] experience, exactly as it was created. ...
I have probably not explained the issue sufficiently: "WAV" is not an audio encoding (or codec). It is a container for encoded audio data. It is therefore incorrect to say that "WAV files give you 100% of the original
lossy lossless [that's what you mean, I think] experience".
Compare the situation to a Word file containing image data. These images can have a lossless encoding (BMP or PNG, for example) or they can have a lossy encoding (GIF or JPG, for example). You can put images with all of these encodings into a Word file.
If you have a Word file with images you will not then say "Word files give you the 100% original lossless image experience", will you? Because it would be silly, and untrue. Word files are agnostic regarding the encoding of images they contain, just as WAV files are agnostic regarding the encoding of the audio data they contain. Their contents may be lossless or they may be lossy. Note that I am speaking of "true" WAV files here, not of "fake" ones containing MP3 data that were transcoded to plain PCM.
WAV files may feature sound in a variety of encodings. Plain PCM (by "plain" I mean PCM with at least 16 bits per sample and a sampling rate of at least 44.1 kHz, the red-book CD standard) is the lossless variant, but there are many other -- lossy -- encodings to be found inside a WAV file: MP3, GSM, ADPCM, CELP, 8-bit-8-kHz PCM and so on. See
Wikipedia's article on WAV.
The widespread belief in the superiority of WAV files is a superstition the tenacity of which is remarkable. What you actually mean when you say "WAV" is plain PCM. But plain PCM is wasteful and should therefore be compressed to save storage space, in a similar way ZIP or RAR files do it. If you unzip a ZIP file you are going to get the original uncompressed data back, bit by bit. Same thing with ALAC, APE, FLAC etc: if you "unzip" (decompress) them you'll have the original uncompressed PCM data.** That which you choose to imprecisely call "WAV".
I posted this rip of the SMA 403 to illustrate the fallacy of WAV worship as "the" lossless audio file format. The files of this rip contain lossy audio data, and directly (encoded with ADPCM), not as a transcoding. ADPCM -- a lossy audio codec -- is part of the WAV file format specification.
Does that make it clear?
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** This is actually what your audio player does when it plays a FLAC (ALAC, APE etc) file: it decompresses the audio data contained in the file (using the appropriate FLAC, ALAC, APE codec algorithms) to PCM.*** The PCM data is then sent to the DAC which transforms it to an electric current that goes into the amplifier. The amp increases the strength of the current to a level that is able to drive the speakers, which lets you hear the sound.
To be more precise: this is what happens with any digital audio file, regardless of whether it's lossless or lossy. Only the algorithms differ, and the acoustic properties of the result. Which is of course also influenced by other factors, such as the quality of the DAC, the amplifier, the speakers etc.
