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Comment by satvikpendem | Hacker News Reader

Can people really tell the difference in day-to-day usage, ie not sitting at your desk in complete silence with your thousand dollar audiophile over-the-ear headphones? I mean, I have such a setup too but it doesn't bother me much to listen to merely "high" quality Spotify if I were to walk around outside, as I wouldn't be able to tell the difference there.

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> Can people really tell the difference

No, and neither can the audiophiles. Well, except those using oxygen free gold plated Ethernet cables.

I can and I don't have gold-plated cables nor am I part of an audiophile community. The people who say you can't are worse than the audiophiles themselves, who I didn't even know before all the whining that there is no one in the world who can hear the difference. One guy had an audio test site and I did the one on my Chromebook with the Chromebook speakers and got 100%. I can definitely hear the difference between a real flac and mp3. The quality is not necessarily better but the highs go higher with flac. MP3s don't go that high, they're clipped and you can hear that. That's how you can, I can tell with songs. In addition, when I play the same song over bluetooth with my iPhone (Spotify, highest quality) and Walkman A55 (Flac) over a 300€ sound system, even my father can hear the difference and he is 53 and worked his whole life in a factory. The statistics on the subject that I have read (from discussion links because I was perplex people said no one can hear a difference) clearly said that most people don’t hear the difference, but that there are indeed people who can tell the difference!

Mp3 at what bit rate? 128 and flac might not be hard. 320 I'm suspicious of the results

I keep flac on my Plex server. I rip mp3s at 192 for the car and opus at 128 for my phone. Different levels of quality/storage space for my three main listening environments.

Same for me, not an audiophile, I have no clue how but I hear differences, I use different combinations of phones and in-ears. It's noticeable whatever those things are doing, it isn't bad but noticeable.

Not to mention the double-compression if listening using bluetooth.

Just like no one could possibly perceive over 60 FPS, right?

I call BS.

There have been lots of double blinds over the years.

So far as I know, the only people that reliably score above chance are those with defective hearing such that they hear mostly frequencies that lossy codecs aren't tuned for. Lots of belief to the contrary but almost no one appears to be able to deliver.

For reasonable bitrates, of course. Generally 256 and up.

Comparisons with FPS are either flawed or perfect depending on how you view it, because of the simple observation that there exists some number of frames per second above which any more improvement is imperceptible. It may not be 60 but it exists.

Very plausible that we reached that inflection point in audio fidelity a long time ago.

yes...but only after 500-1000 dollars and a decent preamp and dac

You could get a decent Chinese IEM for like $20 and it'll make a noticeable difference, even streaming between Apple Music and Spotify.

Any recommendations for a pre-amp and DAC?

I have a few from schitt that have been pretty solid for years, I highly recommend them.

https://www.schiit.com/

Get a decent audio interface. At least that can handle mic/guitar inputs too & handle more output options @ the same price

Even sitting in complete silence with my (couple-hundred) dollar over-the-ear headphones, the High Quality streaming audio still sounds pretty damn good to me.

One interesting counterpoint is that I have several albums that sound far better on vinyl than on any streaming platform, but that's a matter of audio mixing rather than audio quality—whoever keeps doing "digital remasters" that have no low end whatsoever, you're killing me!

Yeah, vinyl was mixed differently because of limitations of the physical media, especially around high frequencies, low frequencies, stereo not being perfect, and "resolution" getting worse towards the center because of CAV.

I pay for Tidal’s highest tier because you can get a fairly high number of albums in Dolby Atmos which sounds great at home and even the AirPods Pro will do their spatial audio thing with 5.1-channel tracks. It’s not surprising that I can hear a difference in this situation, I suppose.

FWIW Apple Music also has the Atmos versions of things

Really? Is there any way to download these? Because there’s a Python project to download the .m4a files containing the EAC-3 codec from Tidal that interests me the most.

I would assume you can’t download them. https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2021/05/apple-music-announces...

What albums are well mixed for Atmos?

I had a 5.1 mix of The Black Album and it felt like a gimmick and it wasn’t actually leveraged artistically.

I definitely have heard stereo mixes with thought given to the channels. Jagged Little Pill being one of them.

Most of ODESZA’s discography is in Dolby Atmos and it is sumptuous. Also, my favorite pianist, Ludovico Einaudi, has his Underwater album in 5.1. Tidal offers hundreds, but I only have about a dozen downloaded.

Might be a Pascals wager of sorts but if I'm spending so much $$ on audio equipment why wouldn't I want to remove compression from the equation?

If you play music on a half decent car stereo, or home sound system, yes, you can 100% tell the difference. Spotify "high" sounds absolutely flat compared to a lossless rip of the same track. (and doesn't have anywhere near the bass)

On earbuds? No.

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