Besides hearing a difference, is there a way to physically measure the difference?
if it takes longer to load and if it has a large file size
You can look at a spectrogram and see more information in higher frequencies and a more accurate signal if you are talking about lossless or high res audio vs lossy
About to give this a go with my best equipment
I do know things. I also know bullshit. Please tell me again that a 1% increase in sound quality is a “crystal clear” difference. The over exaggeration in this community is embarrassing sometimes. Audiophile = Believing Placebos
You just made me relies how unfulfilling this hobby becomes. Worrying about this shit made me forget my main goal, to enjoy music as best as I possibly can. It gets to a point where you start believing in things that aren’t there and then you start getting buyers remorse so you come on a website like this for confirmation because you don’t wanna believe you’ve wasted your money. I’m guilty of this. There’s a reason why companies like Audioquest can sell $1000 cables.
Fuck it I’m selling everything and buying beats lol jk
I’m definitely done with buying new gear as I’m content with what I currently have. Just gonna focus on the headphones cause that’s where the real differences are.
I’m done with my rant
I just did it. VERY INTERESTING.
I got 4/6 of them right. Was listening using the Focal Clear and the Chord Mojo.
Both of the ones I got wrong interestingly I was conflicted between the 128kbps and the WAV file. I never once thought to pick the 320kbps one. The 320kbps one sounds pretty similar to the WAV. Maybe Spotify is fine after all, but then again I was able to single out the WAV in particular most of the time…
The thing that kept happening is I would find the 128kbps and the WAV and know that I was hearing something different but it actually became difficult to decide which one sounded fuller.
On the Coldplay track when the drums and symbols come through really strong in the middle it’s a dead give away. The symbols sound horrible on the lossy track. Shivers down my spine bad. I had to pause the track. There’s like…digital static in those symbols.
Not much of an issue in the 320kbps one though.
The two I missed are the first one, which I can still not really hear a difference on. I don’t think this sort of thing matters much for tracks like that.
The other one that I missed is the classical/piano piece. Again, I’m finding it hard to notice much of a difference. Weird how for the others it was obvious but on this track I still can’t tell.
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the first one is randomized so no one knows what specific one
i was very different… i could EASILY tell a difference between a 128 and 320… i always felt like i was getting something more and the only one i guessed 128 on was the spoken word song where there is almost nothing to really lose, but when it came to WAV i was like “ok i dunno what this sounds like compared to this” and i was like “ok i notice this detail here now but was that in the previous one (and it always was)”
The first one for me was a Jay Z track.
It’s not really detail as much as it is depth and realism. The easiest one of them all to me was the Coldplay track. You just gotta listen for the drum set. Not sure why symbols get screwed like that by lower bitrate but it’s always been a struggle for me with friends who use lossy files. Drives me crazy.
That’s the only one I cannot consistently get. I think it’s more “compression friendly” than the others. In general I think hip hop takes to compression better because there is usually (not always) less going on. There’s a beat and often a single vocalist whereas other genres have more instruments and vocals - more layers of sound you could say - than hip hop. That’s not a statement about talent or artistry, just an observation of musical structure.
Of course I could also be way off. That’s just my best explanation based on my music knowledge and sound compression codec knowledge.
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I think you’re probably right
i think thats why the spoken word song was a problem for me… there is very little stuff to compress… no real details to notice and think “oh that is new and wasn’t as noticable on the other one”
I was wondering was the joke to far reached and it was miles… no thousands of miles away. lol
Crystal clear like, knowing stuff like “how to put a cd correctly in a player”. The pretty basics and not sharing us that the cd sounds better vertical… but not going to more details.
Nothing cable related or noticing 1% differences. lol Just believing in thing… is bad.
The thing is i never really got many good suggestions from Spotify anyway. Instead i would check out lists. Like you can get genre artists lists on wikipedia. Also I used to listen to KROQ and they would have a 107 song list of the year for 1980 - 2010 on http://www.radiohitlist.com/. Also other stations are there. Maybe you could find your own station on the web. If i wanted to listen to a artist in particular i would go to https://www.allmusic.com/ and check out there discography and pick the highest rated album or get a greatest hits. Also Billboard has a searchable top 100 songs for every week going way back 1958 https://www.billboard.com/charts/hot-100. Albums too
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The Suzanne Vega track? After I wrote my last post I realized that one was just her singing, which also makes it simplistic. The difference there is in the wav file you can hear the sounds her mouth makes beyond her vocal sounds. Listen closely and you’ll hear things like her tongue smacking as she enunciates some words. It’s almost an ASMR effect. (having written this it sounds creepy) The human voice is a great audio reference because we all have lots of experience hearing real human voices.
So, the Jay Z track is simple and therefore compression friendly but has enough bass and other sounds to mask his voice to the point it becomes difficult to to hear those vocal subtleties.
with hip hop it becomes less of a vocal thing when telling a difference between subtle ties its all about the beat and backing track. some great albums flac , to pimpa butterfly, good kid maad city as they have a good amount of micro details to catch, most kanye albums, the last 2 tyler the creator albums, injury reserve floss, 4:44 by Jay z. its all down to the creativity and how much the rapper cares about the production side of things ant their producer choices.
Spotify is good if you know kind of how to wrangle it’s algorithm. Basically forget about the “radio” stations on Spotify, and focus on your Discover Weekly playlist and building playlists based off of that. Spotify looks at the songs you put into your playlists and then compares it to other people’s playlists that also have those songs. So if it finds a playlist from someone else with like 3 or 4 songs that you’ve liked or listened to a lot, and there’s one that you’ve never heard before, it adds it to your Discover Weekly. Once you get the Discover Weekly tuned into what you like, it’s pretty good at finding at least 5 or 6 songs every week that you’ll really dig. Usually from there I go listen to the artists that performed those songs and that tends to help me find at least a couple of new artists or a new album from an artist that I haven’t listened to before like every week.
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tbh i never use spotify playlists or radio… i just search the album and try to listen to that one song or album i wanna hear…
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how do you stream it to you system? I use my roku tv hooked to my receiver via optical, and use the amazon music app, but I don’t think it’s streaming HD.
I stream from phone / pc / Fire TV / Echo - if you’ve got “HD” or “Ultra HD” it will show the symbol in yellow:
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I was just describing how one would go about trying to find new music using spotify’s baked in systems for doing that. Obviously if your goal is just to listen to something you already know about then it’s fine for that too, but I primarily use spotify to find new music so I don’t tend to use the search function much unless someone I know recommended a song to me or something like that