Purely marketing for the “more is better” pseudo audiophile.
ABX testing blew the “lossless sounds better” mantra out of the window nearly 2 decade ago [1]
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
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”.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...
Edit: you have edited your comment to remove mention of 320kbps so my comment is now moot :)
Edit: Clearly there is generally a relationship between bitrate and quality, but for compressed audio it is far from "cut and dry".