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Blind Lossless Audio Test

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5 pointsdanielfalbo11 comments

High quality audio is snake oil. It's primary value is to sell you things you don't need. So much has been done to music before you get it there is no real thing to hear. Just enjoy the music, not the fidelity.

To a degree that's pretty much true for every "aficionado" fad out there. After a certain price point, almost everything is indistinguishable. Just manufactured scarcity / "premium". I have friends passionate about wines, whiskey, coffee, audio, water??, and so on. Yes, there is a price point for every one where the difference is obvious, but after that, no one can tell the difference. We actually did a blind coffee tasting in our friend group, and most people preferred some new beans bought from starbucks out of every kind of "unique, pristine, virgin hills" stuff that's overpriced and overhyped. It's doubly funny because all my friends say starbucks coffee sucks. Well, well, well...

Snake oil in what sense? If the difference is noticeable, and some people care about those differences, I think they should be able to enjoy it. There is a lot of hocus pocus for sure, but it would appear to me that just because you personally don't value the differences offered by Hi-Res doesn't make it "snake oil"...?

And here's another one: https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/...

I wonder whether doing this on Chrome on macOS (+ DAC, headphones or whatever your setup) plays the actual files at their best resolution

I feel like Apple Music Hi-res + my DAC and headphones sounds way better than either of the samples from the test

I think the formats are all supported natively, so I assumed that they are played using native macOS decoders etc., not something in Chrome.

Fun fact: I started using HQPlayer, which does upsampling so that whichever DAC you use it doesn't have to, with its limit power compared to for example the M1. It really makes a surprisingly big difference!

Do you play your own files or did you get it to work with Apple Music? If the latter, how?

update: I got it working with Apple Music by following this https://community.roonlabs.com/t/tutorial-apple-music-output...

The James Blake one was the most difficult. With my heaphones and dac/headphone amp combo I got 80%, with the test stating there is 0% likelihood that this result was chance.

As I noted here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45396104, do you also feel like when you're listening to hi-res music with your usual setup songs sound way better than either of the samples from the web test?

No I dont really, the differences are usually not really a matter of better or worse in the subjective experience either - listening to Hi-Res calms my (irrational) fomo however, and with my new speaker setup in my newly acoustically treated room I feel like I might actually benefit from it more. I should do the test again using the speakers I suppose.

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