Never ran any tests here but the difference is so stark that I never really considered it a need.
Kinda like when I switched from SoundCloud to Apple Music. I couldn’t go back to listening to the songs I had in my SC library because it was just noticeably worse.
I’m sure there are ways to rip high fi YouTube audio but the basic options I used in the past yielded results worse than avg SoundCloud quality.
Will say it’s been a few years since trying and I never had any paid for YouTube subscription, don’t even have an account. So, while it may be acceptable, I just never had a need and if I wanted to rip music, I’d be torrenting .flac files, not ripping .mp3s from YouTube
wabasso@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
I was impressed when iTunes added the option to get your album in .flac. And while I acknowledge there’s a lot of placebo effect with audiophillia, I still argue space is cheap and you never know how good your ears and sound system may get in the future.