- What services do you use for lossless music streaming?
- When you have a FLAC file, how do you listen to it in an Android phone or a Linux/Windows machine? Which apps/softwares? And does headphone/speaker quality make a difference- or is it bottlenecked by the audio card of the PC/phone?
I am a noob, and would like the answers, along with some good pointers, if possible.
Speaker quality makes a huge difference according to my experiences from lower end $30 portable speaker to stereo sound systems in cars. Last weekend I rented a Jeep Grand Cherokee. Its sound quality is noticeably terrible because I couldn't hear some backing violin/piano sound of a symphony compared with my own car.
- Now, I'm using Navidrome hosted on my home server (local collection). I also have MPD configured on the same server which is connected to my AV receiver via optical.
- I almost always use my Mac (I use ALAC instead of FLAC). I either use the Navidrome interface, a subsonic client (submariner), or local copies with Doppler. I have a pair of Hifiman Sundara for proper listening (JDS Labs DAC and amplifier), an IEM when there's too much noise outside, and various other headphones tied to different devices. I also do airplay to a couple Homepod Mini.
I need the amp for the Sundara, nothing else can drive it apart from the AV receiver. Less than good encoded files sound awful on the better headphones and speakers, especially if you've listened to the lossless files. As an analogy, I can take pictures taken from a phone. On the screen phone, it looks great, but not so good when displayed on a 43" display, but still ok. So I don't mind listening to a 128kbps mp3 file, but I found lossless files are always clearer and fill the space better.
Iphone: vlc
Linux: rhythmbox
Headphones/speaker quality are vastly more important than anything else for quality sound imho.