I did a blind test, and found it depends on the genre.
Slow, chill music is completely transparent. No matter how hard I “audio peep
But something like System of a Down has distortion. It loosely (not always) coincided with the bitrate of the flac files, which kind of makes sense.
addie@feddit.uk 5 hours ago
Audio codecs like MP3 usually do a Fourier transform to move the sound into the frequency domain, discard any frequencies that you’re unlikely to notice, and encode ‘rate of change’ for the remaining ones. So the encoding problem is usually sound with fast changes in intensity or frequency, which is basically what percussion is.
System is quite percussion heavy, so will sound bad.
Recently moved from Spotify to Qobuz, because fuck Dan Ek, and the fact that they’ve got better bitrates across the board really makes the difference for jazz and jazzy stuff. Neglected, sounds crap on Spotify. Sounds great on Qobuz. But that’s the change from ‘bad’ to ‘quite good’ bitrates; additional bits are very much a case of diminishing returns.
brucethemoose@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Heh. Spotify used to stream 384K Vorbis, which should be sufficient. But now the web app is apparently AAC. And the app-apps are conspicuously listed with “equivalent to” bitrates, whatever that means:
support.spotify.com/us/article/audio-quality/