Which Audio Format Produces The Best Music Quality?

Higher the bit rate better the quality of SOund

And mp3 compression is one of the base methods of compression where the Quality loss is higher as it uses modified White noise to reproduce sound

MIDI format is good and consumes very less memory space

Each and every format has it's own plus and minus Hard to differentiate them

Bitrate plays higher role in quality compared to the format of sound

MIDI - however is only for the instruments. You can't have voice frequencies in there.

I like .wmv format which can be played by windows media player and it sounds good.
On bitrate issue-As our CEan said higher the bitrate better the quality obtained(but high memory).
There are many formats such as .mp3,aac,ogg,midi,wmv,etc but my favourite is wmv.

FLAC is the best format which has lossless compression.No data lost so decompressed data is an identical copy of the original audio data.
Formats like mp3 are based on lossy compression to reduce file size & maintaining acceptable quality level...320k is max bitrate in mp3
as bitrate gets lower ..original data is lost .& der is distortion due to quantization ..

APE is a very highly compressed lossless file, meaning you'll get the most space savings. Its audio quality is the same as FLAC & other lossless files, but it isn't compatible with nearly as many players.

I think the clear and easy choice here is MP3 or AAC. They're compatible with nearly every player out there, and both are indistinguishable from the original source if encoded at a high bitrate.

Speaking of sound quality, isn't using a better earphone/headphone as important as the audio format for best experience? We can discuss that too!

AAC is slightly better than MP3. But personally, MP3 is fine by me as long as its 192 kbps. Though, difference between MP3/AAC and CD quality is definitely obvious.

FLAC should be more prevalent now that cost of storage is low. More newer players support this format. A typical song is around 25 MB. So its a great format to rip off songs from your CD collection. I do believe there are some websites that sell lossless tracks that you can download as well.

No-one mentioned .opus ? Opus is future, no wonder why Google,vlc,skype & few other good companies are backing it.

For actual performance I would vote for wav format over any But the file sizes can be nightmarish to most users

Opus I have not tried it out I will give it a go today or tomo

Well all types of lossless formats can give you an excellent sound quality. WMV is good. Also every operating system or environment can have its own format. So you need to basically look for those without any loss.

If you are music lover then go for Lossless compression, period.
Flac is awesome takes less than half space of wav file.