My brain says this audio is certainly better since I paid a lot of money for it, but my ears are in disagreement. Perhaps it’s because I suffer from tinnitus.
Is anyone else in the same boat?
But I can also believe that it is at least somewhat different for audiophiles. I once took a beer judge certification course, and, by the end of it, I could easily distinguish flavor subtleties that were completely imperceptible to me at the start of the class. Not just in a "I think I can" way, but reliably in blind tests. And I've had a similar experience of imperceptible differences becoming easy to spot when learning to speak new languages. So it seems possible to me that simply being an audiophile makes it possible to care about subtleties that non-audiophiles can't even hear, because brains are magical like that.
TL;DR: If I had 5,000 dollars to spend on high end audio equipment for my living room, I'd spend 3,500-4,000 on the speakers. But I wouldn't, personally. I'd spend half of that and get 98% of the quality.
For example you have the Japanese audiophiles spending 100,000 on speakers but live in a 10x10 room, or install power lines as they say they can hear the difference.
Audio reaches diminishing returns pretty quickly, you aren't going to see massive audio gains by upping your budget from $2,000 to $20,000 but you will by going from $200 to $2,000. At a certain point you are paying for a sound curve that suits you over the end all be all music reproduction.
A lot of stuff is getting cheaper too with good class D amplifiers with very low distortion being available to DIY and custom builders for relatively cheap (as long as you aren't in the class D is garbage audiophile crowd, which I think is similar to the my $1,000 dollar wire is better than your $50 dollar wires).
I think for almost anyone who doesn't want to actively turn listening to music into a hobby, I think ~$100 each headphones and a DAC is the highest end anyone will ever notice.
Xiph seems to agree: https://web.archive.org/web/20200124190800/https://people.xi...
Of course, when you look at these high resolution recordings, the amplitude of material above 20kHz is piddling. The amount of harmonics/overtones in acoustic instruments is minuscule in the first place.
https://i.imgur.com/ZgU1bgI.jpg https://i.imgur.com/RZpbyyI.jpg
Both have the same 24-bit color space. Both have the same blackest black and whitest white. Both have the same resolution. And yet one preserves more detail and information. This is the nature of lossy compression.
Your analogy misunderstands audio signals. The resolution components of bit depth and lossy compression are different axes and should not be conflated with or analogised to frequency resolution. They behave very differently.
Here's an english copy of the test:
http://www.geocities.ws/altbinariessoundsmusicclassical/mp3t...
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range#Humans
"Old-fashioned" CD, when mastered with modern noise shaping, gets super-close to the fundamental limits of human hearing. Furthermore, as the above link points out, older people often can't hear above 15khz. Thus, if you're older, you might not be capable of hearing the difference between a CD and the same mix on BluRay or DVD.
FWIW: There's a lot of psuedoscience in the audiophile market. Things like DSD and sampling rates about 96khz make little sense outside of the recording studio. (This is because the absolute upper limit of human hearing is 28khz. 96khz exceeds the human hearing range by almost an octave.)
https://i.imgur.com/ZgU1bgI.jpg https://i.imgur.com/RZpbyyI.jpg
Both have the same 24-bit color space. Both have the same blackest black and whitest white. Both have the same resolution. And yet one preserves more detail and information. This is the nature of lossy compression.
But going above 96khz or DSD is silly outside of the recording studio.
I did hear a difference, but it's not obvious. It's not a "OMG WHOA" when you put on the latest crisp FLAC compared to whatever streamed from Apple Music. On some tracks, the difference is nil. But on the occasional track, the hi-fi version is just clearer end-to-end. And on a few tracks, you will hear tiny little things you'd never heard before, and this can be actually exhilarating -- like, there will be a track I've listened to 100 times, and now suddenly I hear the bit of sticky-spit sound as the singer opens his mouth right before starting to sing... and that instantly makes it like you're standing right next to the microphone. Sounds silly, but it's cool.
Unfortunately they're just not comfortable enough to wear all day.
So day-to-day I use mmx 300's for everything else.
I did have to buy one of those "demonstration CDs" and test stuff out. I wonder how many people do that?
I then realized that the headphones cost around $2000 (Audeze LCD-3) and a dac that I didn't recognize, but I'm sure it wasn't cheap.
But there were too many variables to tell what made the difference. Was it the expensive headphones + dac? Was it the better quality audio? Was it the different mastering of the song that I know?
Either way, I still listen to my "shit" audio setup because it's good enough for me and what I'm used too.
That usually means one of two things—
1. the frequency response of this new system is different, changing the relative loudness of different instruments;
2. the context caused you to concentrate on the music differently and your experience of it was therefore different.
The critical thing nobody ever says is "I heard things I never heard before, then I went back to my regular system and I stopped hearing the new thing." That never[0] happens—because the thing you hadn't noticed was there all along.
[0] Edit: Okay yes, so not never. I was assuming that the regular system is a reasonably competent modern setup. The median intentional audio system, shall we say.
...well, I have, but only when I was a child, and my “regular system” was a thing my parents bought for probably less than $20.
I own Stax, electrostats that make Audeze look plebian, plugged into their fancy Stax amp (although not the fanciest), plugged into a Theta DAC that is basically a 44.1/48khz Schiit Yggy, and there isn't some amazing leap.
Also, fun fact, want a 90% Audeze LCD clone? Monoprice M1070 and M1570. I have the predecessor, the M1060, fucking amazing for a $300 can, but flawed enough that I recommend the newer models of it.
Amplifiers don't tend to matter much any more - cheap class B solid-state amps are all fine these days (heaphone amps are a lottery though).
Digital sources have largely sounded perfect for the past 20 years.
A properly set up pair of good speakers in a room big enough to let them do their thing can be an _astonishing_ thing to hear.
I used to be a earphones or nought when I was a kid, then I started using some "expensive" Sony headphones, had those almost a decade now but have since started using a combination of IEMs, monitor speakers and a pair of planar magnetic headphones with big drivers.
Even though I'm decades older than when I started, and in theory my hearing is worse, I hear things in music I've listened to for all of this time that I didn't before.
I have a high res audio player, I buy high res music and all that, but the single biggest difference I'd say is having a good size driver, 40mm+ for headphones, the ability to drive them well (a cheapish but not too cheap amp) and some decent quality music, ideally MP3 320 or something or lossless.
As someone who doesn't make music or content I wouldn't recommend monitor speakers for general listening unless you're a true purist, they don't sound "fun", they're extremely directional and I can only describe them as "clinical".
The same can be said for many IEMs, but not always.
Is it worth the money? Honestly I'm not sure. I probably could've gotten there with an investment of $500-1000. But now I have a beautiful piece of hardware that might last a decade or two.
I think to even try, you need to set up an A/B system and precisely match levels. If you don't match levels, the louder one will always sound better.
I've tried it before, but it's hard to match levels. It's even harder if you're swapping headphones or earbuds.
On the setup I have 128k/transcoded MP3 also definitely has less interesting detail than higher quality files.
Twenty years ago, such files would have been barely listenable. Ten years ago, this would have been tolerable but obviously compromised. Today, with the best encoders, 128k MP3s are shockingly good. Certainly not perfect. But good.
MP3 encoding has come a long way.