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Comment by tomc1985 | Hacker News Reader

tomc1985

Their coverage of indie labels and the dance music underground still sucks. Plus I don't think their streaming is lossless and you can easily spot the difference with something as simple as a pair of $100 wireless headphones (NOT beats) hooked up to a $100 USB headphone amp.

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Fun fact: bluetooth audio is not lossless (best case is 264kbps AAC, which is unlikely to be better than Spotify's 320 kbps Vorbis), so that's pretty much a moot point.

Sennheiser's 2.4ghz wireless seems to be, best I can tell

Their streaming is not lossless. There are also two different quality levels for streaming that you can choose in settings, ensure you've selected high quality, I'm not sure what the default is.

Upon saying that, even with my Sennheiser HD 202s and Macbook built-in audio I can tell the difference between Spotify and lossless FLAC. My Australian internet is so bad that I probably couldn't even stream FLAC anyway.

Default is 160kbps Ogg Vorbis, high quality is 320kbps.

For the mobile app, it's 96, 160 and 320 for normal, high and extreme, respectively.

Chromecast and the browser-based player both use AAC, at a maximum of 256kbps.

How do you hook up wireless headphones to an amp?

PC <- USB Amp <- Headphone Base station

It's not lossless, you're right. I'm an audiophile too (E10K driving DT770s) and I've never done any A/B testing between a Spotify track and a FLAC equivalent. I'm curious how much the difference is.

Be careful that it may be hard to match levels 100%, and it's hard to do a blind test with audio coming from two different applications.

There may also be mastering differences between different versions of an album.

So the best thing is actually to do your own Ogg Vorbis encodes of a lossless album you have, and do the a/b testing on those files instead, so you're certain of the provenance.

It's really easy to spot with classical music (muddy bass and treble) or tracks with really shimmery high-end (like lots of hats and cymbals). Basically anything that stresses the encoder

You can take a look at Deezer, same service, same or even larger catalog than Spotify and IMHO better indie music collection.

There's high definition audio setting somewhere in preferences, although that might be just higher bitrate

IIRC it's basically the equivalent of going from 192kbps to 320kbps.

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