I read in the paper edition some years ago
if I remember correctly he even did measurements to prove that there is a difference between compressed and uncompressed flac out of a hi-end dac, even from a computer that is not cpu constrained, playing the files.
I am not able to find this on the Internet, will look for it !!!!
At least I'd like to see if there is any difference, there are many things that shouldn't make a difference that actually do, and it doesn't cost money to try out....
Anyway, today there is zero reason to do compression, disk space is almost for free