Spotify announces HiFi, a lossless streaming tier coming later this year
theverge.com
theverge.com
ABX testing blew the “lossless sounds better” mantra out of the window nearly 2 decade ago [1]
Also doesn't matter for me since my car, a tech filled tesla, streams spotify at what sounds like the lowest possible bitrate.
Too low bite rate can show in some few cases. High hats seem to be difficult and some organ music, transients in general iirc. And you need good enough equipment (I don't mean expensive). This kind of analytical listening to detect small problems is exhausting. Relaxed listening does not need lossless codecs.
But mastering is the key. I would pay premium for good mastering instead of lossless.
>A total of 100 participants engaged with the listening test and were recruited from the Merchiston campus at Edinburgh Napier University. With respect to background, 28% were students at the University, whilst 33% were academic or faculty staff and 39% were administrative and support staff. Participants were not offered any form of remuneration or any other form of inducement for their involvement.
This [1] Was the only test that had included Uncompressed WAV or PCM as anchor. And it was tested with sort of randomly selected participants, and randomly selected sample sound track.
>Purely marketing for the “more is better” pseudo audiophile.
All the other test listed were done during what I called the Audio Codec era on HydrogenAudio. Where professional encoder developers and enthusiast ABX the hell out of psychoacoustics tuning. Along with problematic samples testing.
For 90%+ of general public, MP3 128kbps with a decent encoder ( LAME ) has been good enough for well over a decade. Suggesting better codec doesn't matter and is purely for pseudo audiophile completely neglect the work people have been tuning and making these audio codec better for the past ~20 years.
And yes, 10 years later Musepack v8 still beats AAC or Opus in High Bitrate.
I never suggested that better codecs don’t matter. I was stating that lossy codecs are amazing and that lossless, no matter which codec is used, isn’t necessary.
(I can't argue based on perceptual differences, but it just seems "wrong" to have the compressed version be the library master.)
No it doesn’t. It shows their mastering/tuning techniques are different or they have access to different sources. Compression, wrt codecs, has nothing to do with the difference in sound you’re hearing.
It’s definitely about compression. Implementations can differ significantly for the same formats, as anyone who remembers the initial MP3 frenzy can tell. The fact you cannot discern two random codecs at their max quality doesn’t mean Apple and Spotify cannot have a meaningful difference with their streaming codecs (both custom afaik).
Pack your bags. Just Google it, or you can start here [1]. A relevant quote “This is because Spotify applies Loudness Normalization to your tracks as they're played to listeners”
A brief search shows that both Apple and Spotify offer 256kbps AAC. ABX testing these two would be pointless. They’re both above transparent. It’s NOT the codec.
Send me to heaven if X would allow for parametric EQ settings based on headphone/sound system. This would appeal to *actual audiophiles [2]. This would confuse the hell out of normals, so bullet point marketing is what we get.
[1] https://artists.spotify.com/faq/mastering-and-loudness [2] https://github.com/jaakkopasanen/AutoEq
While Spotify IS applying file compression (ala mp3) to every one of their records (and this affects the sound quality) I have not heard any reports of them applying any additional post-EQ or volume compression in the way that, say, a radio station might. I believe you may be mistaken as to what the Loudness Normalization feature is doing.
It is simply turning down the volume of tracks that have been mixed/mastered to excessive loudness levels so that they match the average loudness of more sensibly-mixed/mastered songs. Turning the volume of the louder track down has no effect whatsoever on it's audio quality. The meta-effect, then, is that the normalization disincentivizes the practice of mixing/mastering songs too hot; something which DOES have a negative effect on the audio quality of a song.
What is it then? At any rate, if this new offering can match Apple Music quality then it’s a win - and not “pure marketing”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...
Edit: Clearly there is generally a relationship between bitrate and quality, but for compressed audio it is far from "cut and dry".
Edit: you have edited your comment to remove mention of 320kbps so my comment is now moot :)
Good news though. Losses saves you from conversion artifacts. Compression that's not further mangled sounds fine, but what's weird is if you run something with one crompression model through other compressors (ie, to get it onto a network then airplay then etc. )
The bitrates relative to the endless youtube / netflix / twitch streaming are still very small - 4K video streaming just crushed bandwidth, I'd love to know the youtube / netflix / prime video / twitch bandwidth loads, they have to be insane.
Happily, AirPlay compression is lossless (assuming 24-bit or less and 48 kHz or less).
My audio setup isn't the best in the world, just a JDS Labs Element II and Sennheiser HD6XX, but for the stuff I listen to I have a hard time distinguishing between lossless and 256k AAC. I've ABX tested various bitrates of MP3s and can pick those out, but AAC eliminates the telltale artifacts that MP3s bring.
Might help that Apple streams "mastered for iTunes" copies for a number of albums which mandates less compression prior to encoding but I think it mostly boils down to AAC being better suited for music than MP3.
(The difference obviously has nothing to do with compression format.)
I hope Spotify will match the quality because Spotify Connect is way more reliable than the Cast broken mess.
I can't find anything that suggests this is actually true.
The only thing I can find indicates that their HiFi versions are based on MQA-supplied 24-bit masters, but that doesn't tell you whether or not DRC was applied to the source mix that MQA used.
And given that an uncompressed mix would require remastering by the artist/studio (DRC is not just a byproduct of conversion to a 16-bit format), you'll forgive me if I'm incredibly skeptical of this claim.
I certainly can't consistently identify which one is lossless in a blind test, but there is an audible difference between the same song in Vorbis and FLAC.
I don't know how useful this distinction is though.
Then I guessed "same or different" quality. Got about 85% right overall.
I'm sure it wasn't perfectly blind, but seems to indicate to me that it does in fact sound different. Now, I cannot say for sure it's not sound cards or other things in the output path causing differences as well.
Now if you asked me to pick which was HD and which was 320, I did worse than random. So I am not claiming that HD sounds "better", just different.
Do you really hear a difference? My setup is probably really bad and I probably really suck but even 96 bit lame was indistinguishable from lossless to me, except for one part in one song.
But I’m not in the habit of telling people how to spend their money. If they enjoy the music more because they paid more for it, no objections here. I’ve got plenty of wasteful hobbies myself.
And yet when I google "do all humans perceive sound the same way" the overwhelming response is that, no, humans do not perceive sound the same way. So how can compression work equally well for everyone?
As an audiophile, why risk it?
For myself, I've got Meridian processor and speakers and I can for sure tell the difference. Can I tell the difference when it's playing on a bluetooth speaker? Not so much.
Does it make a difference for AirPods. On the one hand, the AirPods will recompress to AAC, so you get compressed audio anyway. But if the source material is compressed in some other format, then it will have lost information, while recompressing it for AAC will lose different information. So if you have AirPods then you really want lossless to start with: that way you'll only have the AAC losses.
For most material I cannot tell the difference between lossless and AAC/Vorbis. But I can tell the difference on some metal tracks. Not all. Just some.
I’m not an audiophile but it sounds amazing on my AirPods and great on my Echos and in the car. My wife even said she doesn’t want to go back.
If Spotify provides bitrates near that, you will want it.
While it's arguable that there'll be no perceptible difference listening to 320kbps Vorbis versus "HiFi" on a dedicated device, I imagine there could be a difference when transcoding to AAC. Time will tell.
[Sorry if the post covers this, I didn't read it because it wanted too many domains whitelisted for js.]
... in direct proportion to the delta in bandwidth between their "lossless" codec and state-of-the art compression with comparable sound quality.-
Those poor ISPs having to upgrade their services to support their user's needs.
I am just overly concerned about internet congestion ...
... but, as somebody upthread rightly points out, it's all video anyway.
(Porn, I posit ...)
Defining meaningful then. Majority of the bandwidth is spent on entertainment I would assume.
(No sane person would object to anything on the basis of it being entertainment ...)