My kids laugh at me because I still buy CDs and rip them and some bandcamp. I rip to flac, not for some audiophile reason, but because I can rip a single file for the album with metadata included and space is cheap.
I never have to worry about an internet connection or if an artist drops from a platform.
Precise precise the reason I stopped using spotify, I wish enough people would send the message that our time is not theirs, and they absolutely must not take the whole screen hostage for their crap
Can people really tell the difference in day-to-day usage, ie not sitting at your desk in complete silence with your thousand dollar audiophile over-the-ear headphones? I mean, I have such a setup too but it doesn't bother me much to listen to merely "high" quality Spotify if I were to walk around outside, as I wouldn't be able to tell the difference there.
I can and I don't have gold-plated cables nor am I part of an audiophile community. The people who say you can't are worse than the audiophiles themselves, who I didn't even know before all the whining that there is no one in the world who can hear the difference. One guy had an audio test site and I did the one on my Chromebook with the Chromebook speakers and got 100%. I can definitely hear the difference between a real flac and mp3. The quality is not necessarily better but the highs go higher with flac. MP3s don't go that high, they're clipped and you can hear that. That's how you can, I can tell with songs.
In addition, when I play the same song over bluetooth with my iPhone (Spotify, highest quality) and Walkman A55 (Flac) over a 300€ sound system, even my father can hear the difference and he is 53 and worked his whole life in a factory.
The statistics on the subject that I have read (from discussion links because I was perplex people said no one can hear a difference) clearly said that most people don’t hear the difference, but that there are indeed people who can tell the difference!
Even sitting in complete silence with my (couple-hundred) dollar over-the-ear headphones, the High Quality streaming audio still sounds pretty damn good to me.
One interesting counterpoint is that I have several albums that sound far better on vinyl than on any streaming platform, but that's a matter of audio mixing rather than audio quality—whoever keeps doing "digital remasters" that have no low end whatsoever, you're killing me!
Yeah, vinyl was mixed differently because of limitations of the physical media, especially around high frequencies, low frequencies, stereo not being perfect, and "resolution" getting worse towards the center because of CAV.
I pay for Tidal’s highest tier because you can get a fairly high number of albums in Dolby Atmos which sounds great at home and even the AirPods Pro will do their spatial audio thing with 5.1-channel tracks. It’s not surprising that I can hear a difference in this situation, I suppose.
If you play music on a half decent car stereo, or home sound system, yes, you can 100% tell the difference. Spotify "high" sounds absolutely flat compared to a lossless rip of the same track. (and doesn't have anywhere near the bass)
So this means that royalty rates for lossless streaming will be double the royalty rates for lossy streaming, right? (/s)
Since mastering for Spotify is usually optimized for earbuds and cheap speakers (i.e. more compressed) instead of a decent set of speakers/headphones that try to give as much soundstage/detail as possible, this is likely going to just be a huge waste of bandwidth.
I do hope not. I enjoy the lossless audio on Apple Music and don’t really want my subscription price to double if they see Spotify charging a higher price for it.
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I never have to worry about an internet connection or if an artist drops from a platform.
He spent one summer ripping about 400 CDs he owned.
He was ripping them into a directory called .junk. He moved each into the parent directory when it was complete.
And the final command of his project was 'rm -rf . junk'.
It's a proofreader too.
Divided by 20 amounts to 16-33 years. Roughly.
That’s why I don’t bother about CDs anymore. I used to carry them around privately on a NAT Server many years ago, copying them to my iPod.
[0]https://picard.musicbrainz.org/
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I’m getting very tired of popup screens at the most annoying of times.
No, and neither can the audiophiles. Well, except those using oxygen free gold plated Ethernet cables.
I call BS.
One interesting counterpoint is that I have several albums that sound far better on vinyl than on any streaming platform, but that's a matter of audio mixing rather than audio quality—whoever keeps doing "digital remasters" that have no low end whatsoever, you're killing me!
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I had a 5.1 mix of The Black Album and it felt like a gimmick and it wasn’t actually leveraged artistically.
I definitely have heard stereo mixes with thought given to the channels. Jagged Little Pill being one of them.
On earbuds? No.
Since mastering for Spotify is usually optimized for earbuds and cheap speakers (i.e. more compressed) instead of a decent set of speakers/headphones that try to give as much soundstage/detail as possible, this is likely going to just be a huge waste of bandwidth.