You get oxygen free copper because you install it permanently and don’t want it to rust and fail and have to rip out your ceiling and walls
So get the good stuff it’s not sound quality it’s so it lasts
Fun fact: this is where the “banana connector” came from. Before copper was discovered, early humans used bananas for all their audio connections. The name stuck, even though wires are made of metal today.
Additional trivia: The term “banana republic” originates from countries best known for exporting high-end audio equipment back in the day.
“banana split” stems from a failed experiment where scientists tried to split audio frequencies by sticking the connectors into ice cream and running the audio through it
And Bananarama was so named for their high-fidelity recordings which were performed, mixed, and recorded entirely on bananas.
Yup. Failed spectacularly, which is why they went for mixing boards as a backup solution instead.
TIL! It’s fucking bananas that I never knew this.
Bravo
This will now be a standard AI response. Well done.
well obviously, all this proves is that copper wires are just as bad as wet mud. Every audiophile knows you need gold oxygen nitrogen purified wires blessed by a voodoo witch doctor.
I’ve got these cables. Yes, they are expensive but they are absolutely fantasti… wait, did you say voodoo witch doctor? Mine were blessed by just a witch doctor. Have I been ripped off?
Hoodoo is 3dB better than voodoo according to my tests.
Hoodoo? You do! Do what? Remind me of the babe!
Silver is the better conductor. Even if it is priced so that peons can afford it.
Sheeeit not recently, shot up to $120/oz recently, and it’s back down to ~$80/oz right now, but that’s still more than ~$35/oz last year. Not that gold didn’t also follow that trajectory or anything, it’s still more, but GODDAMN.
So wait, did they send analoge or digital signals through? Because digital means you could send it through anything and as long as it gets through its the same. The cable only matters when you ARENT using digital signals.
If I read it correctly, it was analog and they found that only the signal amplitude was meaningfully changed, not the quality
Makes sense. As long as the transfer medium isn’t highly capacitive or inductive, it doesn’t matter as long as you compensate for the loss in signal strength.
…and now I fell into a research rabbit hole regarding mud capacitance.
EDIT: Mud is actually slightly capacitive. Source: “Static Dielectric Constant of Water and Steam”, a 1980 journal article by M. Uematsu and E. U. Franck* published in Journal of Physical and Chemical Reference Data
Just ask an audiophile what they think about blind tests. If they argue against them you’ve found a snake oil salesman.
“You can’t trust blind tests for audio, that’s the wrong sense bro. You need double deaf studies, obvs.”
But what’s the point of having your newly-purchased $3000 wooden volume knob and polyatomic copper ring bus lift yet another veil from the soundstage if you’re blindfolded?
HEY! I got my $3000 wooden volume knob because it’s pretty and I can’t take a blind test if it’s worth it. I need my eyes to see it!
All I want to know is just how many veils has that soundstage got‽ Here I am, just having a soundstage like a sucker, and they’ve got veils they can lift!
3k is obviously an exaggeration but goddamn why is woodwork so expensive?! I needed wooden set of some things that are normally made of plastic for about $100, the wood was $465 and literally only one guy on earth makes it. Fuck me!
Now if they’re deaf tests on the other hand…
I’m lightly active in the headphone enthusiast space. Even in the more light-hearted circles there is still an elevated amount of placebo bullshit and stubborn belief in things that verifiably make zero difference.
It’s rather fascinating in a way. I’ve been in and out of various hobbies over the course of my life but there is just something about audio that attracts an atmosphere of wilful ignorance and bad actors that prey on it.
I’m a musician. I swear by Beyerdynamic DT700. Fucking great headphones for like an insanely reasonable price
Awesome headphones. If you don’t mind the beyer peak. My favorites are my grado rs2. But I prefer music on speakers not headphones, so much space is lost on headphones. Hear a pair of magnepans in a room and you’ll be blown away. Got some original SMGa’s from 1989!
Real audio enthusiasts know the room is the most important, followed by the speaker itself, followed by the actual source. Then the amp etc.
And when you record and mix music you realize how much of it is bullshit in the end. The source is all that matters, really.
I buy headphone cables based on how nice the cable feels, if it transmits noise when it rubs against stuff, and how well the connectors fit into the devices I am using.
My favorite is when people get picky about cabling for digital transfer. The ones and zeroes either get there or they don’t, nothing in-between. They work or they don’t.
I think the best thing to do is to assess your ability to hear difference. I can absolutely hear the difference between my Bluetooth earbuds and a decent wired IEM, so I use wired headphones for listening to music. I CANNOT hear a significant qualitative difference between the $25 Chinese IEMs that I use and more expensive options that I have tried, so I use the cheap ones.
To be sure, there ARE perceptible differences between wired headphones, but those are more a matter of EQ and personal preference. I can achieve my maximum perceivable level of quality with pretty inexpensive hardware. It doesn’t mean that other people cannot, that isn’t my problem.
Regarding digital, quality spdif cables absolutely matter. One tiny mistake and they crackle out and don’t work. I’ve gone through many pairs of cheap ones until I just spend the money to never have issues again.
Now will the 1 dollar one sound the same as the 80 dolalr one? Yes. It won’t last or hohld up to dust or abuse at all though.
It’s a rich playground for the price-equals-value fallacy, and there are plenty of well-heeled rubes that’ll fall for the technobabble.
I’ve been in the audio enthusiast community for like 17 years now. When I was fresh, the internet commentators had me thinking there was some audio heaven in the high end compared to the mid range priced gear. Now I know better and the gear community is not so high end price evangelicals like it used to be. I feel like there was a before and after the $30 Monoprice DJ headphones and the wave of headphones since. Then especially IEMs. Once ChiFi really got rolling with IEMs and amplifiers and DACs, $1000+ snake oil salespeople got to deal in a way more competitive market
Same with speakers. Internet changed everything. No more at the whim of specialty audio stores stock and Best Buys. Now you got the whole worlds amount of speaker brands at a click of a finger plus craigslist/offerup. Also again ChiFi amplifiers and DACs. Also improvements in audio codecs whether for wireless or not. Bluetooth audio was awful until it stopped being awful as standards improved
These days I mostly see the placebo audio arguments in streaming service and FLAC/lossless encode fanboys. Headphone and speaker communities these days seem a lot more self aware and steeped in self-deprecating humor over the cost, diminishing returns, placebo, snake oil they live in today compared to 17 years ago. I want my digital audio cables endpoints plated with the highest quality diamonds to preserve the zeros and ones. No lab diamonds. Must be natural providing the warmth only blood diamonds that excel in removing negative ions. I treat my room with the finest pink himalayan salt sound absorbent wall panels to deal with the most problematic materials used by homebuilders. Authentic himalayan salt has been shown to be some of the highest quality material in filtering unwanted noise and echos while leaving clean pure audio bliss
Gotta love those people with fiber optic cables with gold plated connectors.
I couldn’t agree more. I got interest in higher-end audio equipment when I was younger, so I went to a local audio shop to test out some Grado headphones. They had a display of different headphones all hooked up to the “same” audio source.
60x vs 80x sounded identical. 60x to 125x, the latter had a bit more bass. 125x to 325x, the latter had a lot more bass and the clarity was a bit better. Then I plugged the 60x into the same connection they had the 325x in. Suddenly the 60x sounded damn similar. Not quite as good, but the 60x was 1/3 the cost and the 325x sure as hell didn’t sound 3x better. They just had the EQ set better for it.
Picked up a bose system test cassette once. It sounds amazing at first listen on anything because they overhype the high and low end, much like most bad modern music. And its actually fatiguing over time and stresses people out. Big reason I hate a lot of (popular) modern music is the over hyped non natural eq.
Friends will show me songs and they grind on my ears with that unnautural 3k boost to make everything “radio sounding”, gross. I don’t want modern radio polish (and the sampled kick drums, awful) I want good sound.
Commodores, night shift, 1985, one of the best sounding albums of all time because they knew what they were doing. And funnily enough one of the first digital tape recordings on a Mitsubishi! Also the nightfly.
No more at the whim of specialty audio stores stock and Best Buys.
I remember in 2017 going into an audio store near where I worked, and the guy was emphasizing how clear the audio sounded on certain (expensive) setups, and how it was streaming in from “Norway” which was better than what you’d find on Spotify or YouTube. It took me a while to piece together what he was on about.
Dude was talking about Tidal. All he meant was they streamed lossless formats via Tidal. As if anyone could tell the difference between, say, stereo 192kbps AAC and flac.
Also, remember the supposed amazing quality of MQA? What a shitshow. It’s rather remarkable that a pair of Airpods Pro 2, when fit into your ears properly, are essentially perfectly tuned headphones for only $250 or less compared to some of what the competition sells. Not to say I don’t love my Sennheiser HD650.
These days I mostly see the placebo audio arguments in streaming service and FLAC/lossless encode fanboys.
The clamour for lossless/high-res streaming is the audiophile community in a nutshell. Literally paying more money so your brain can trick you into thinking it sounds better.
Like many hobbies, it’s mainly a way to rationalize spending ever increasing amounts on new equipment and source content. I was into the whole scene for a while, but once I had discovered what components in the audio chain actually improve sound quality and which don’t, I called it quits.
The push for lossless seems more like pushback on low bit rate and reduced dynamic range by avoiding compression altogether. Not really a snob thing as much as trying to avoid a common issue.
The video version is getting the Blu-ray which is significantly better than streaming in specific scenes. For example every scene that I have seen with confetti on any streaming service is an eldritch horror of artifacts, but fine on physical media, because the streaming compression just can’t handle that kind of fast changing detail.
It does depend on the music or video though, the vast majority are fine with compression.
My roommate always corrects me when I make this same point, so I’ll pass it along. Blu-Rays are compressed using H.264/H.265, just less than streaming services.
Higher bitrate though init
Significantly, streaming is 8-16Mbps for 4K, whereas 4K discs are >100
🤓☝️ many older blu-rays also used VC1
Or worse. I think it was the original Ninja Turtles movie that I had owned on DVD and the quality of it kind of sucked. Years later I got it on blu ray and I swear they just ripped one of the DVD copies to make the blu ray disc.
Sadly, that basically feels like what happened with The Fellowship of the Ring’s theatrical cut blu ray, too. It just doesn’t look that great.
Then the extended edition has decent fidelity but some bizarro green-blue color grading.
People don’t like hearing this, but streaming services tune their codecs to properly calibrated TVs. Very few people have properly calibrated TVs. In particular, people really like to up the brightness and contrast.
A lot of scenes that look like mud are that way because you really aren’t supposed to be able distinguish between those levels of blackness.
That said, streaming services should have seen the 1000 comments like the ones here and adjusted already. You don’t need bluray level of bits to make things look better in those dark scenes, you need to tune your encoder to allow it to throw more bits into the void.
Lmao, I promise streaming services and CDNs employ world-class experts in encoding, both in tuning and development. They have already poured through maximized quality vs cost. Tuning your encoder to allow for more bits in some scenes by definition ups the average bitrate of the file, unless you’re also taking bits away from other scenes. Streaming services have already found a balance of video quality vs storage/bandwith costs that they are willing to accept, which tends to be around 15mbps for 4k. That will unarguably provide a drastically worse experience on a high-enough quality tv than a 40mbps+ bluray. Like, day and night in most scenes and even more in others.
Calibrating your tv, while a great idea, can only do so much vs low-bitrate encodings and the fake HDR services build in solely to trigger the HDR popup on your tv and trick it into upping the brightness rather than to actuality improve the color accuracy/vibrancy.
They don’t really care about the quality, they care that subscribers will keep their subscriptions. They go as low quality as possible to cut costs while retaining subs.
Blu-rays don’t have this same issue because there are no storage or bandwith costs to the provider, and people buying blu-rays are typically more informed, have higher quality equipment, and care more about image quality than your typical streaming subscriber.
I promise streaming services and CDNs employ world-class experts in encoding
They don’t really care about the quality
It’s funny that you are trying to make both these points at the same time.
You don’t hire world class experts if you don’t care about quality.
I have a hobby of doing re-encoding blurays to lower bitrates. And one thing that’s pretty obvious is the world class experts who wrote the encoders in the first place have them overly tuned to omit data from dark areas of a scene to avoid wasting bits in that location. This is true of H265, VP9, and AV1. You have to specifically tune those encoders to push the encoder to spend more of it’s bits on the dark area or you have to up the bitrate to absurd levels.
Where these encoders spend the bitrate in dark scenes is on any areas of light within the scene. That works great if you are looking at something like a tree with a lot of dark patches, but it really messes with a single light person with darkness everywhere. It just so happens that it’s really easy to dump 2mbps on a torch in a hall and leave just 0.1mbps on the rest of the scene.
That will unarguably provide a drastically worse experience on a high-enough quality tv than a 40mbps+ bluray. Like, day and night in most scenes and even more in others.
I can tell you that this is simply false. And it’s the same psuedo-scientific logic that someone trying to sell gold plated cables and FLAC encodings pushes.
Look, beyond just the darkness tuning problem that streaming services have, the other problem they have is a QOS. The way content is encoded for streaming just isn’t ideal. When you say “they have to hit 14mpbs” the fact is that they are forcing themselves to do 14mbps throughout the entire video. The reason they do this is because they want to limit buffering as much as possible. It’s a lot better experience to lower your resolution because you are constantly buffering. But that action makes it really hard to do good video optimizations on the encoder. Ever second of the video they are burning 14mb whether they need those 14mb or not. The way that’d deliver less data would be if they only averaged 14mbps rather than forcing it throughout. Allowing for 40mbps bursts when needed but then pushing everything else out at 1mbps saves on bandwidth. However, the end user doesn’t know that the reason they just started buffering is because a high motion action scene is coming up (and netflix doesn’t want to buffer for more than a few minutes).
The other point I’d make is that streaming companies simply have a pipeline that they shove all video through. And, because it’s so generalized, these sorts of tradeoffs which make stuff look like a blocky mess happen. Sometimes that blocky mess is present in the source material (The streaming services aren’t ripping the blurays themselves, they get it from the content providers who aren’t necessarily sending in raws).
I say all this because you can absolutely get 4k and 1080p looking good at sub-bluray rates. I have a library filled with these re-encodes that look great because of my experience here. A decent amount of HD media can be encoded at 1 or 2mbps and look great. But you have to make tradeoffs that streaming companies won’t make.
For the record, the way I do my encoding is a scene by scene encode using VMAF to adjust the quality rate with some custom software I built to do just that. I target a 95% VMAF which ends up looking just fantastic across media.
I fail to see where TV calibration comes in here tbh. If I can see blocky artifacts from low bitrate it will show up on any screen unless you turn the brightness down so far that nothing is visible.
Blocky artifacts typically appear in low light situations. There will be situations where it might just be blocky due to not having enough bits (high motion scenes) but there are plenty of cases where low light tuning is where you’d end up noticing the blockyness.
The thing is, dynamic range compression and audio file compression are two entirely separate things. People often conflate the two by thinking that going from wav or flac to a lossy file format like mp3 or m4a means the track becomes more compressed dynamically, but that’s not the case at all. Essentially, an mp3 and a flac version of the same track will have the same dynamic range.
And yes, while audible artifacts can be a thing with very low bitrate lossy compression, once you get to128kbps with a modern lossy codec it becomes pretty much impossible to hear in a blind test. Hell, even 96kbps opus is much audibly perfect for the vast majority of listeners.
In a distant past I liked to compare hires tracks with the normal ones. It turned out that they often used a different master with more dynamic range for the hires release, tricking the listener into thinking it sounded different because of the high bitrate and sampling frequency. The second step was to convert the high resolution track to standard 16 bit 44.1 kHz and do a/b testing to prove my point to friends.
I think it depends on your source.
If we are talking about a downloaded good high bit rate MP3 and a FLAC, then yeah, I can’t hear a difference.
For streaming, I CAN hear a difference between the default spotify stream and my locally stored lossless files. That difference might come down to how they are mastered or whatever spotify does to the files, but whatever it is the difference is pretty perceptible to me and I don’t have especially sensitive ears.
If we’re talking free tier Spotify, then it could actually be due to the bitrate (96kbps OGG vorbis, IIRC). However, if you’re a premium subscriber then the standard bitrate is 160kbps, which is definitely not audible to 99.99% of people.
In fact, after much ABX testing, I found that a noticeable audible difference between a local file and the same song on a streaming service is almost always due to either a loudness differential or because the two tracks come from different masters.
I really noticed when I switched from Spotify to Tidal that there is something different about Spotify’s sound quality that makes it worse even at the highest streaming quality. I was surprised since I fully admit that in 99% of cases I can’t tell the difference between a 128kbps MP3 and a FLAC of the same file.
Usually when I hear someone swear by lossless audio one service provides compared to another, I swear the reality is either placebo or one service is just using a better masterering of an album compared to another. The service that has on their service the better version album mix and mastering. Like they could serve it as 192kbps MP3 and sound better than a lossless encoded album version with the non ideal mix and mastered release
Oh, 100%. I actually tested this by recording bit perfect copies from different streaming services and comparing them using Audacity.
I found that they only way to hear a difference between the same song played on two different platforms was 1) if there was a notable difference in gain or 2) if they were using two different masters for the same song. If two platforms were using the same master version, they were impossible to tell apart in an ABX test.
All of this is to say that the quality of the mastering is orders of magnitude more important than whether or not a track is lossy or lossless, as far as audible audio quality goes.
Not here to argue I can hear the difference, because I can’t. But in audio collecting where the size and burden of even large lossless files isn’t much different from lossy files, why care? I download the flac files and compress upon delivery to the client where the space might be of a larger concern.
I do the same, as it happens, so I won’t argue with you.
As for “why care?”, I’d say it’s about making informed decisions and not spending money unnecessarily in the pursuit of genuinely better sound quality.
Yeah, I don’t get too deep into that game. I do have some higher-ish quality headphones and speakers though. I also find that subs are largely underrated by audio snobs.
I’ll agree that sound quality doesn’t seem to be consistent but I will say that Bose is a very nice quality sounding company. Never been disappointed by them.
The one time I was absolutely blown away by a pair of headphones that are not in the insano area, are the beyerdynamic dt1990. They aren’t cheap by any means but not insanely expensive. When I listened to music I’ve listened to hundreds of times, somehow they showed me even more detail I haven’t heard before. For example a Nena 99 red balloons LP, the amp was still the same as always but I couldn’t believe the amount of detail there was in the background, the soundstage those headphones were creating.
A lot of it comes down to a mix of snobbishness, sunk cost fallacy, and tribalism.
You can’t admit that your $5,000 pair of headphones sound exactly the same as a $300 pair, because:
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You’d no longer be able to pretend that you’re better than the people who have $300 headphones.
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You’d have to admit to yourself that you completely wasted $4,700.
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You’d have to realize that the tight-knit community you’ve formed with other $10k headphone people isn’t really bettor or even really distinct from communities of people with $300 headphones.
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I have a set of Sony studio monitor headphones. I can hear more nuance and parts of the music I simply can’t hear in any of my ear buds or noise canceling headphones. They aren’t wireless, so I don’t really use them that often though.
It doesn’t matter the cable, the amp, shitty 128kbps mp3 or vinyl. I can’t hear much, much better with the drivers in them.
I’d say 90% of anything that matters is the driver. But past a certain midrange point, there just isn’t really much or any improvement.
I fucking love audio and have an extensive collection of equipment. The last thing in the chain before your ears (so headphones and speakers) will absolutely make a difference and the thing that provides power to that can make a difference. But the cables? The fucking cables?! Absolutely no impact once you’re above like $10. Turns out, electrons are electrons and they behave like electrons. Shockingly that doesn’t change in copper, gold plated copper, pure silver, or mud. Doubly so for the non analog part of the chain. Hell I’ve even seen “audiophile grade” ethernet cables.
The other part of the equation is if the differences made by the things that do make a difference actually matter to the listener. They do to me, but my dad is more than happy to just use the speakers on his Dell monitors.
Well, that’s not entirely correct. Given a long enough run, attenuation will absolutely cause bad cables to perform poorly. Like your not getting a 10 meter run on bananas. That said, for any modern cable, that run has to be greater than 50 meters for it to even start mattering. So if your wiring up a warehouse, you probably need to care about the type of wire your using.
Like your not getting a 10 meter run on bananas.
Source? /s
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a 10 metre banana.
Oh yeah, definitely. The wiring needs for an industrial space or event venue are different than a domicile, but I don’t think anyone’s buying audiophile snake oil for those. They really seem to market that kinda crap to the fool and their money crowd.
It mattered more back in the analog days, I think. Now that it’s all digital, and going through dac’s, its all just about being good enough for 1’s and 0’s to get through. “Noise” doesn’t exist for digital audio. It either works, or it doesn’t.
I think a lot of it is a sort of sunk cost fallacy.
They bought the expensive shit, so they have to believe it’s better.
Apple Syndrome
It’s been like this for decades, according to my dad. Well before the internet.
Behold:
5.4 Electrical Conductivity Measurement This method includes electrical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) and dielectric analysis (DEA). The physical state of a material is measured as a function of frequency in EIS and the frequency ranges from 100 Hz - 10 MHz. It is simple and easier technique used to estimate the physiological status of various biological tissues49-52. Experimental frequency response of impedance is characterised by electrical equivalent circuits of materials. The physical properties of materials can be quantified by monitoring the changes in parameters at the equivalent circuit, among various equivalent models proposed53-54. DEA measurement is used in high frequency areas, generally 100 MHz - 10 GHz. DEA is used in moisture estimation and bulk density determination
So a overripe banana is an interesting high-pass filter, kinda like a capacitor, though the big takeaway is the conductance vs ripeness.
So if you want to test if a banana is ready to eat, hook it up… preferably with several other bananas in series. If the music is too loud, they are ready. Too quiet, and it’s not time yet.
The moment you give me a link to a banana tree/MP3 player/ripeness tester/EQ:
I only listen to music with overripe bananas. It sounds best that way. Copper wire just doesn’t sound as good. Believe me: My ears are very sensitive and superior to yours.
You get much better conductivity with plaintains because the cross-sectional area is bigger.
But because my ears are so discerning, I only put my audio jacks in jackfruit.
but what cables did they use; https://www.whathifi.com/best-buys/accessories/best-audio-cables
I listen to QUAD 77-11L speakers from like a lifetime ago, and a cheap class-D thing from Aliexpress. It’s fine.
HugeNerd is correct, 90+% of audio quality is in the mic and speakers. Transducers make electro acoustics real, everything else is support.
Get really great used speakers cheap and an adequate amp just good enough to drive them. Your shit will sound excellent for anyone.
Well, I’d argue the placement and room are an integral part of it as well.
In that sense the room is part of the transducer itself, yes, as the speaker cabinet supports the speaker driver, so do the walls and room size. Think of them as a system.
Pretty much, and I don’t think my stylish cardboard and wood-shavings condo is going to make expensive Totem Acoustic speakers sound their best… I had a pair of affordable Paradigm floor-standing speakers, but everything sounded hollow. They sounded great in the store, that happened to be a field-stone and timber construction with corner room treatments, etc
In my dry-wall and toothpick chamber, the sound just bounces around randomly. So then I got rid of the big speakers and got tiny QUAD ones, and that’s all I need. I can of course tell the difference from a premium setup, but I can’t afford a nice home.
I can also tell Angus steak from grocery-store all-beef hot dogs, but … money.
Hot dogs it is.
Most people can’t tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and lossless, but hey if folks really want to waste their money on snake oil like gold-plated cables then I say let ‘em.
Depends on the song really, if it’s just a standard pop song it’s mixing well usually come through just fine on a shitty MP3. The more layers a song may have the muddier it gets at lower bit rates. Like I’ve found the noisier spectrum of punk always benefits from higher bit rates.
Reminds me of the lengths people go with their peripheral purchases to save 1-2ms of input latency for playing games with like a 20 TPS tick rate on a wifi connection
Most people can’t tell the difference between a 320kbps mp3 and lossless
I’d be surprised if anyone could.
However, 128kbps vs. 192kpbs+ is like night and day, and it’s especially obvious with better equipment.
People who say 128kbps mp3 is fine, are full of shit. I’ve been to weddings where it’s been so obvious that whoever’s in charge of the music is just blasting 128kpbs mp3s and it’s brutal.
At that quality of MP3 you’d really need either a track that specifically pushes the limits of the codec on technicalities, or a one in a million hearing + high precision monitors.
Albeit FLAC is generally a better option still because it compresses things losslessly, reducing raw file size 50-70% (comparable to MP3 at 128kbps bitrate) and is a royalty-free, meaning it can be freely implemented as a hardware codec.
For example, a bunch of microcontrollers in the ESP32 family have built in FLAC codecs that outperform their MP3 counterparts, meaning a FLAC library can be directly streamed to them, and with the right DAC combo, one can build inexpensive, low power adapters to hook their existing AV systems up to Sonos-style streaming. And with many AV systems supporting bidirectional RS232 (or other serial) communications for controlling the system and querying it’s state, you can literally smartify them completely AND provide high quality audio streams to them.
128kbps files are roughly 90% compression from raw, so not comparable. I’ll admit that I haven’t bothered with FLAC much, but in my limited experience it generally is pretty rare to see much above 50-55% compression from raw.
The funny thing is that the people who can afford all that overpriced garbage are usually so old, they can’t hear all that well anymore.
I did a blind test, and found it depends on the genre.
Slow, chill music is completely transparent when compressed, no matter how hard I “audio peep.” It’s not even a question.
But something “dense” like System of a Down has audible distortion. It loosely (not always) coincided with the bitrate of the flac files, which kind of makes sense, though even the extreme end is hard to notice unless you know the particular song very well.
Also… a lot of recordings kind of suck. It’s crazy to worry about tiny bits of distortion when a bit perfect master is already noisy and distorted.
Audio codecs like MP3 usually do a Fourier transform to move the sound into the frequency domain, discard any frequencies that you’re unlikely to notice, and encode ‘rate of change’ for the remaining ones. So the encoding problem is usually sound with fast changes in intensity or frequency, which is basically what percussion is.
System is quite percussion heavy, so will sound bad.
Recently moved from Spotify to Qobuz, because fuck Dan Ek, and the fact that they’ve got better bitrates across the board really makes the difference for jazz and jazzy stuff. Neglected, sounds crap on Spotify. Sounds great on Qobuz. But that’s the change from ‘bad’ to ‘quite good’ bitrates; additional bits are very much a case of diminishing returns.
That makes sense.
Heh. Spotify used to stream 384K Vorbis, which should be sufficient. But now the web app is apparently AAC. And the app-apps are conspicuously listed with “equivalent to” bitrates, whatever that means:
https://support.spotify.com/us/article/audio-quality/
Very high: Equivalent to approximately 320kbit/s
I noticed something similar with video. Like, if I am paying attention, the difference between the highest quality encoding and the next level is usually visible.
However, I have a harder time telling the difference if I don’t do a side by side comparison.
And even when I can easily tell the difference, once I’m watching the thing, I get into the story and I don’t care anyways.
Obviously a slightly different criteria compared to music, but people do make a big deal out of stuff that even they don’t actually care about.
I found I can detect VBR but yeah at that bitrate I really can’t tell the difference between 320 and flac, always thought it was just my ears!
Hell, I can’t even tell the difference between 128kbps and flac. Realizing that saved me a whole lot of hard drive space :D
My hearing isn’t extraordinarily acute, bit I can hear the difference, especially in transient-rich sounds like cymbals.
With quality headphones, back to back, I’m confident that you could
It’s still a good idea to have your main music library in flac for future proofing, but yeah 128kbps opus or ogg is what I use on mobile devices.
And even if you can - is it worth it? I mean - do I care and should I care? Is the point of music detecting every detail of the recording or can I appreciate it without paying that much attention to production? For instance, I find it much more convenient to use Bluetooth headphones as it allows me to move around the house. Flac immediately stops being relevant, as Bluetooth codec is really bad compared to almost any codec. I recently tried ldac codec on my headphones - couldn’t really tell the difference. Mp3 128kbps is just fine for me. Almost any situation. I care about musical content much more than production details. Other people might care more. I don’t.
This is the other part. Idk if it’s me, or my equipment, but like… I listen to music for the music. I might like certain genres (noise music comes to mind) more on higher end equipment, because that’s the point, but also… Eh? Not why I’m here.
I kinda want to start a snake oil audio cable company. It’s gotta be one of the easiest paths to retirement
I downloaded the same track from soundcloud at 320kbps mp3 and bandcamp FLAC and played them at the same time in the VDJ changing from one song to the other and couldn’t feel any difference (the graphic Soundwave was also exactly the same). I had not tried it in actual club environment, but when the mp3 is really compressed it shows visually on the Soundwave
Yep, and an especially fun fact is that people with high-end equipment prefer MP3 over lossless.
But did they use oxygen-free copper (OFC) wire? Because otherwise the results are skewed as regular copper sounds just as bad as a banana stuck in wet mud.
i’m into oxygen free listening lately
Nah, they used oxygen-free bananas though.
Audiophiles get a lot of friction, but this kind of person exists in almost any hobby. People fascinated by equipment and ascetics who loose the plot about what their hobby is all about.
Or wet mud
Does dry mud exist? I’m pretty sure we just call that dirt xD
Holy shit english has so many specific terms for dirt! It’s just jargon to urban dwellers.
i personally find bananna audio the most appealing
I just want DECENT audio quality and metal construction so that it lasts and the plastic doesn’t break from light wear&tear
