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Comment by nvarsj | Hacker News Reader

Spotify is pretty much bottom of the barrel if you're a music album fan, I think.

I find it's only good at playing random songs on giant playlists, or playing the radio. Managing a library of albums is a huge pain and I still don't understand how it's supposed to work.

Then there is the problem of questionable digital masters. There's 0 transparency into the mastering process and what Spotify uses. As you've observed, some things just sound really awful on Spotify.

If you really want the best, I suggest Roon + Tidal subscription for playback. Then use Qobuz/Bandcamp/etc. to purchase lossless FLACs to import into Roon, or rip CDs yourself. This will give you the best quality, and you can be certain the source quality is good. You can use Tidal lossless for streaming things you don't buy (but the selection is much more limited). The Roon UX is way, way better than Spotify for managing a large collection of albums.

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Audirvana is another app which competes with Roon. Audirvana is a one-time fee of $100, versus Roon's subscription model (or, I think, ~$800 lifetime subscription, which is pretty up there).

I think the big thing both Roon and Audirvana achieve sub-optimally is just overall application performance and user experience. They do have a ton of features which help in managing massive audio libraries, far better than Spotify or Tidal alone. But, Roon legitimately feels like a browser app they threw in an iframe and nativefied. Audirvana is better IMO, but isn't as good as Roon at auto-discovering album artwork and metadata-ifying the connections between your local songs for hyperlinking and discovery.

The critical thing that I love about that methodology of music playback is the "synthesis" they both do of Tidal and your local music. There is a ton of music out there that's inaccessible on (all!) streaming services, and every audiophile I know eventually starts amassing a collection of lossless files from Bandcamp/etc. Neither a streaming service nor your local library alone is ever the "complete" view into all the music you want to enjoy; you need both, synthesized into one integrated view. Google Play Music used to be a decent solution to this, not the greatest quality but it solved this problem well, but then Google nerfed it into the ground.

There's still a lot of work to be done in this domain. To be honest, my go-to for local music playback is the same app I've been using for a decade after the fall of Winamp; Foobar (Windows). Its simple, ridiculously performant, infinitely customizable, and works great.

> You can use Tidal lossless for streaming things.

I have a Focal Clear, Schiit Lyr 3, Schiit Bifrost 2 and I can not tell the difference between Tidal and Apple Music. There are tests online which people regularly post on Head-Fi and Reddit which also shows that almost all people can't distinguish lossless from high quality lossy encodes.

> or rip CDs yourself. This will give you the best quality

No it won't.

As Apple describes in their guide for Apple Music they have, "dynamic range that’s superior to red book CD audio" because they transcode from the high-bit masters.

https://www.apple.com/itunes/docs/apple-digital-masters.pdf

Master quality is king these days, when "transparent" compression codecs are used. However, there are still many people who believe they can hear/feel the difference. You will need a combination of a golden ear and extra good equipment, starting from about 1K and above for a headphone setup.

As much as dislike Spotify's UI, I listen to a mountain of fringe content that no other streaming service carries but Spotify has in spades, because all of the indies make sure to upload to Spotify.

I'm sorely tempted to build my own library/playlist management front-end on top of Spotify's API. They're the only streaming service I've found with an official streaming/remote control API, and with upcoming lossless support (albeit only CD-quality), their library with a tailor-made UI seems like the best trade-off I'm going to get in a music service.

Spotify doesn't "master", you upload an uncompressed version of the track, and they will encode to OGG with a target LUFS. Classical music isn't impacted by this; it's loud rock, pop and EDM with aggressive limiting where the volume gets turned down. When people complain about the sound quality, it's largely junk masters handed over to Spotify, not the encoding process. Granted, if you _really_ try to listen to artifacts, they are usually in transients.

Yeah I know how Spotify works. What I mean is the end user has no idea where the source comes from, how it was mastered or ripped, or what Spotify's criteria is for quality. It is opaque, and there have been examples of bad digital masters/rips used by Spotify. It seems all you can do is report bad tracks when you encounter them: https://community.spotify.com/t5/Social/Jitter-due-to-bad-CD.... The OP even gave examples of classical tracks which have audible problems.

None of this is an issue if you rip your own CDs or buy lossless from reputable sources in my experience. Spotify you're at the mercy of whatever crap Spotify has been given.

Thanks for the recommendations. I'm still very new to streaming and still buy CDs for most of my music. I am currently using UAPP on my phone and plug it straight into an RME ADI-2 DAC, the advantage being I don't have to fire up the PC. The disadvantage of course is storage on the phone.

Roon sounds like it would be great for you - but you'll have to spend some time and money on setting it up. I have all my music in lossless FLAC on a Synology NAS and run the Roon server on there. The Roon client should work on your phone and connect to your RME ADI-2 DAC as well (great DAC btw, I'd really like one myself). It handles lossless streaming, and ensuring the digital chain is optimized for quality all the way to your DAC. It can also apply arbitrary parametric EQ on the server side, in case you want to use some EQ profiles for your HD800s if you don't have the RME handy.

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