Please take 5-10 minutes before (potentially) wasting your money on lossless music

[AndyluvzDub]

7 hours ago, Tigerleon said:

In what way? The audio quality isn't different we both know it's placebo when it comes to that because you have confirmation bias. I agree that Spotify isn't the best because of the payout to artists and musicians. But really? If it's that noticeable I'd really like to see measurements.

I run a THX 789 Linear Headphone amp with balanced audio using XLR + Sennheiser HD58x 

 

It’s very noticeable for me 

[AndyluvzDub]

7 hours ago, Tigerleon said:

imo btw

Apparently I’m not the only one

 

 https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleMusic/s/1k0THuaETB

 

https://www.soundguys.com/apple-music-vs-spotify-36833/

 

One thing I did notice when I had Spotify was, the audio felt like A/B in my car. When I switched to AM, the I was able to hear more of the sounds and instruments in my cars shitty speakers. 
 

Spotify is like a social media app now. Yes, Spotify beats AM by a mile when it comes to the collaborative playlist and social aspect. But audio quality and overall music library, AM by a mile

 

 

[Tigerleon]

46 minutes ago, AndyluvzDub said:

I run a THX 789 Linear Headphone amp with balanced audio using XLR + Sennheiser HD58x 

 

It’s very noticeable for me 

You know that balanced only makes a difference for longer cables and volume-wise. Maybe if interference is so bad it will go away in a balanced setup if noticeable in a single-ended output

 

32 minutes ago, AndyluvzDub said:

Apparently I’m not the only one

 

 https://www.reddit.com/r/AppleMusic/s/1k0THuaETB

 

https://www.soundguys.com/apple-music-vs-spotify-36833/

 

One thing I did notice when I had Spotify was, the audio felt like A/B in my car. When I switched to AM, the I was able to hear more of the sounds and instruments in my cars shitty speakers. 
 

Spotify is like a social media app now. Yes, Spotify beats AM by a mile when it comes to the collaborative playlist and social aspect. But audio quality and overall music library, AM by a mile

 

 

You aren't the only one but I will not for certain believe that there is a small-medium difference in quality unless I try it. I think I will try a free trial and check it out.

 

[Thaldor]

Not to even mention that there's quite a large amount of music where the lossless doesn't really do anything because the music is mixed and mastered for the masses. Pretty much if the source is CD quality, mp3-encoding really doesn't do that much damage it would be noticeable. With higher than CD-quality releases you must be very source critical as modern studios rarely use higher than CD quality digital recording because it's enough and 99% of the listeners don't notice the difference between CD-quality and higher quality recording (even upping the bitdepth from 24 to 32 is a MAJOR investment that hardly pays back a cent).

 

As in, if you listen any mass produced music, there's a good chance either or both the mixer and the masterer went and checked their work on car stereos, if it sounds good, to the press it goes and your  thousands of dollars costing aluminium shelf with balanced floating feets is pretty much an overkill.

 

Now a cool trick to actually HEAR the difference between whatever two almost identical sounds, like if you have mp3 and FLAC version of the same track: Get Reaper or whatever DAW you can, input the tracks, make sure they have identical timing (so one isn't even 0.whatever milliseconds ahead of another, the "base signal" of the tracks is identical), flip the phase of one of the tracks, play both tracks simultaneously and what you hear is the absolute difference between the tracks (the inverted phase will be negate itself from the other track like noise cancelling).

Note: There will be something left unless the tracks are completely identical. But most of the time this is the way which will rip apart even the house valued speakers some of the audiophiles have and you can laugh at them for wasting tens/hundreds of thousands on speakers that aren't PERFECTLY identical. This is the audio equivalent of taking out the oscilloscope, zooming in and then acting like the 0.0000001V difference for 0.000001s between the signals is somehow meaningful and you should sacrifice your last kidney to fix it.

 

Edit: As in, here is the difference between Judas Priest Metal Meltdown 16bit 44.1kHz FLAC @ 1051kbps (total size 36MB) and the same in MP3 320kbps (total size 11MB).

 

There's a tiny hiss with some noticeable audio if you turn your volume up, but be careful with that volume because you're going to need to turn that way up and you don't want to forget it there. And if you can't hear anything, don't worry, just means you definitely are wasting money paying for lossless streaming since your audio equipment literally cannot produce the difference between lossless FLAC and 320 mp3.

 

And here's the difference between the same FLAC and MP3 192kbps (total size 6.64MB)

 

Now the hiss and the audio is a bit more audible but we are also around 850kbps lower on the bitrate.