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Comment by whymsicalburito | Hacker News Reader

I don't feel like streaming quality is the biggest issue. Spotify's highest quality rate (for paid users) is pretty good, but the audio compression for streaming to a bluetooth device kills the quality. I've stuck with wired headphones because the quality is so much better than bluetooth.

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I disagree, I have switched from Spotify premium (HQ) to Tidal uncompressed and have noticed a huge difference. I usually listen on a wired pair of Senheisser HD-25 ii’s. Its very frustrating for me that Spotify doesn’t support anything better than 320 MP3, it truly sounds muddy.

It's time for double blind testing!

320 is more than enough for 99.99% of population, which really shows how bad tidals business plan is.

(Currently listening to spoken words at 48kbps and my ears are by no means bleeding)

agreed. wired headphones are the way to go.

What about apt-HD ? how's the quality ?

I have Sennheiser Momentum True Wireless with aptX HD support and the sound is marvelous. No compression artifacts at all.

AptX HD implementation on Pixel 2 XL, on the other side, is subpar. I sometimes get nasty clicks on music with high dynamic range and there's no way to avoid them other than to set output codec to anything but aptX HD, which tremendously affects the quality.

I noticed turning the headphone on and off while disabling BT on phone often fixes that.

Google might not be at fault here, I suspect this is Qualcomm code.

I have two wireless headphones, one with and one without but otherwise similar.

The difference in quality is HUGE for music, not so much for anything else.

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