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Comment by Tsarp | Hacker News Reader

This really is driving a muscle/super car, or drinking expensive wine. At the end none of specs or tests matter. It is a form of art. If it makes the listener feel better (even if its just psychological) then its probably worth it.

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To expand on this a bit, I appreciate some audio overkill because, if I do hear sizzle or distortion, it eliminates one possible reason and helps me figure out what’s actually happening.

It’s like having gigabit internet to my house: I don’t actually need it, but when a website is slow, I know the problem isn’t in my internet connection.

Would 192khz audio result in less sizzle and distortion? Or more audible band IMD from the sound >22khz

Well, at least there are objective performance benchmarks on cars, and some of them are okay proxies of performance in motorsports.

https://www.carwow.co.uk/blog/carwow-quarter-mile-400-metre-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_N%C3%BCrburgring_Nords...

I'd distinguish between differences that anyone can detect but some may not care about, and differences that may not be objectively detectable at all. Muscle cars, at least, are different in a way that anyone can see. Push that pedal to the floor and it feels different from a Honda Civic or whatever. Whether that difference is actually interesting or good is, of course, a matter of taste. Whereas audiophile nonsense is often indistinguishable even to the connoisseur and depends entirely on some form of self-deception. Still could be worth it, depending on what one considers worthy.

Correct. I've paid for Tidal for a decade because I just like the peace of mind that it's closer to the original recording. I'm sure it's mostly placebo, but I like it.

It's also sort of an inverted “Van Halen demanding a bowl of M&Ms with the brown ones removed” thing for me, too. The vast majority of my Tidal listening happens over Bluetooth, so that 24bit/192kHz FLAC stream is just gonna get downsampled to 16bit/48kHz anyway because that's all any Bluetooth speaker or headset is capable of doing — but the fact that it's an option in the first place signals that other things are being done right, too (namely: that Tidal's whole “we're the streaming service that pays artists the most per listen” premise actually has some semblance of merit rather than being complete marketing bullshit; while recording quality ain't the strongest signal possible for that, it's certainly a good sign when musicians/publishers are willing to send over the highest-bitrate lossless recordings they've got and not just the same ol' compressed-to-shit MPEG audio you can yank off YouTube for free).

The original recording of almost all music on Tidal was done with equipment that was very, very far from the 192kHz "fidelity" it claims.

I still prefer lossless over MP3

I tried Tidal nearly a decade ago, and the audible fluttering effect caused by their audio watermarking totally ruined certain types of music, like choral recordings, strings and such. It was obviously apparent on $20 ear buds driven by any device, far beyond the more stereotypical audiophile gripes.

I opened a support ticket but they never responded. After that it was difficult to take their lossless claims seriously when the labels were providing such garbage source material. Their whole value prop was totally hollowed out.

I don't know whether the labels still impose such horrible practices, but I largely gave up on streaming services after that experience and now focus on keeping good digital archives of my physical library.

They don't have anything like that anymore

I'm pretty strongly in the camp of trust the science and measurements for audio stuff. Thus I suspect its mostly just better sounding masters, but I was shocked at how much I noticed the sound quality of Tidal compared to Spotify when I switched.

That’s actually a really good comparison, especially because - yes I can hear the difference between an excruciatingly lossless digitization of a piece of music that I’m intimately familiar with, played back on expertly configured hardware… but the difference is so little, that most of the time, I’m find just listening to it at medium high quality streaming on a pair of <$50 headphones.

I’ve played with the nice toys, and they are nice, but for 100x the price, they barely deliver 1.5x the experience.

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