Is it though? Voice consumes so much less sonic bandwidth than music. I imagine the codec places extra emphasis on faithfully reproducing voices, since our brains are so wired to perceive them. A 256kbps spoken word recording is going to be a lot higher quality, comparatively, than a musical recording.

I meant "archival" in an absolute/save-all-the-exact-bits sense.

For whatever reason, if someone were interested in knowing exactly which bits were on the CDs, my copy wouldn't suffice.

Trust me, I know I wouldn't be able to hear the difference in an ABX test.