The use of lossy compression is designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent the audio recording and still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio for most listeners. An MP3 file that is created using the setting of 128 kbit/s will result in a file that is about 1/11 the size of the CD file created from the original audio source (44,100 samples per second × 16 bits per sample × 2 channels = 1,411,200 bit/s; MP3 compressed at 128 kbit/s: 128,000 bit/s [1 k = 1,000, not 1024, because it is a bit rate]. Ratio: 1,411,200/128,000 = 11.025). An MP3 file can also be constructed at higher or lower bit rates, with higher or lower resulting quality.
What is the main goal aside from reducing the amount of data required to store the audio?
sound like a faithful reproduction