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this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2023
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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.
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.
Do you realize AirPods Max/iPhone is capped at AAC/256 kbps over BT, and needs DAC -> ADC -> DAC to use a wired connection?
Yep, absolutely this.
You cannot listen to music 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.
Yes! (Kinda) I’m not saying lossless music is the end all be all, and honestly in normal life I prefer non-lossless, because its SOO much less data, and you can hardly tell the difference in normal listening anyway. What I was trying to express was how bad badly done compression can sound. Good compression exists, and it can sound nearly identical anecdotally, but there is a limit to how low you can go before you start hearing it, and I’m trying to say that I think Spotify has chosen a rate below that level by default. I switched to a higher profile and the problem is mostly gone.