as a young 20 year old i doubt those services have new music. Spotify has albums SAME day
Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
And yet, they still aren’t even close to the highest paying service when it comes to musicians getting their cut.
dittomusic.com/…/how-much-do-music-streaming-serv…
It’s hilarious that Napster now tops the list. I use Tidal, myself, since it’s got great quality audio. Spotify is horrible quality for 2023.
crab@monero.town 1 year ago
To my surprise, even Spotify’s standard (not high or very high) is extremely difficult, if not practically impossible for the average consumer to differentiate from lossless (on better than consumer grade hardware). Upon hearing this, me and several friends decided to test it for ourselves by taking lossless files for several songs and resampling them to the same codec and bitrates that Spotify’s standard quality uses, then ABX testing the before and after with Foobar’s ABX and exclusive mode plugins (also tried the popular comparison website, but that’s apparently less accurate). One of my friends had access to a college studio, I have a dac and sennheiser, and the third had sony wxm4s. To our surprise, none of us could consistently differentiate the two. Its not perfect considering we didn’t grab the outputs directly from the streaming platforms, but that would’ve added extra variables like volume normalizing (louder sounds better).
Our conclusion is that the quality “difference” is likely placebo and probably a waste of bandwidth.
pup_atlas@pawb.social 1 year ago
I wholeheartedly disagree. I have more trained ears then most (worked in video production), but not by much, and when i got my AirPods Max, I thought they sounded awful at first. They were crunchy and dithered sounding in this weird way. I was gonna return them, but I did some testing, and discovered that I was hearing Spotify compression. I turned up the quality as high as it would go in the settings, and that made it a little bit better, but I could still hear it, and can to this day. I did some further testing by signing up for a tidal free trial, in addition to Apple Music. Listening in lossless was an entirely different experience, I could definitely tell the two apart blindly, without even specifically looking for sound quality. There were like 2 to 3 instruments in a given song that I wouldn’t be able to pick out in the lower quality audio, that I could easily pick out in the lossless audio. You have to have a pretty decent pair of headphones to be able to hear it, but some of the higher and consumer stuff can definitely hit that level, and when you do, it’s not something you have to go looking for, it sounds very obvious.
First@programming.dev 1 year ago
Do you realize AirPods Max/iPhone is capped at AAC/356 kbps over BT, and needs DAC -> ADC -> DAC to use a wired connection?
HexagonSun@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Yep, absolutely this.
You cannot listen to musically losslessly with AirPods Max, cabled or not.
From Apple’s own site: “The Lightning to 3.5 mm Audio Cable was designed to allow AirPods Max to connect to analog sources for listening to movies and music. AirPods Max can be connected to devices playing Lossless and Hi-Res Lossless recordings with exceptional audio quality. However, given the analog-to-digital conversion in the cable, the playback will not be completely lossless.”
If someone thinks AirPods Max sound amazing, they’re agreeing how good compressed audio can sound, whether they realise it or not.
pup_atlas@pawb.social 1 year ago
There may be other factors at play, Apple quite likes to compress stream data between their own devices, even on “standard” protocols (just look at their monitor collaboration with LG where they did the same thing to exceed the max resolution of an existing display signal). Regardless, there is a difference, and it is not a small one. It was immediately obvious to me after listening to a single song. Something about the pipeline is crunching audio to the level where it’s obviously degraded. This isn’t audiophile grade splitting hairs and “I think it sounds ever so slightly better with these gold cables” it was like the difference between 480p and 1080p video to me, enough to be actually annoying during normal listening, even if I was actively trying to forget about it.
astray@lemm.ee 1 year ago
I’m not trained in anything useful but I had a similar experience. It was like upgrading from a 720 screen to a 4k screen.
BigBananaDealer@lemm.ee 1 year ago
i figured having volume normalizer off would be the best quality
i think a lot of people that complain about the “bad” quality simply have the volume normalizer on, which makes the quality worse for some songs