That came in the news literally after I wrote my previous comment. FLAC is great of course, because it's lossless.
If you google Tidal vs Spotify song count, though, you'll find sources which say Tidal has more songs than Spotify. I've found everything I want on Tidal as well.
Lossy audio compression algorithms work based on psychoacoustic effects. The average human ear will not detect all the "parts" in a lossless signal - there are things you can drop from the signal because:
So in order to determine exactly which parts of an audio signal could be dropped because we don't hear them anyway, they measured a couple of thousand people's listening profiles.
And they used that "average human profile" to create their algorithm.
This, of course, has a consequence which most people, including you apparently, do not understand:
The better your personal "ear" matches the average psychoacoustic model used by lossy algorithms, the better the signal will sound to you.
In other words, older people, or people with certain deficiencies in their hearing capabilities, will need higher bitrates not to notice the difference. In the 90s, I used to be happy with 192 kbps CBR MP3. But now, being an old fuck, boy, can I hear the difference.
Ironically, I can detect the difference not because my ears are "trained" or "better", I can detect it because my ears are worse than yours!
So the whole bottom line is this: While it may be true that you, personally, do not require lossless to enjoy music to the fullest, other people do. Claiming that lossless isn't needed by 99.9% of the population is horseshit and only demonstrates that you have no clue about how lossy compression works in the first place.
Yep, converting lossy to a lossless format won't magically bring back what was lost during the lossy compression.
Changing from Spotify to Tidal absolutely makes sense if you're sensible to these differences, because Spotify's best possible quality basically equals Tidal's worst (320 kbps lossless). Well, and Tidal's max quality is 24bit 192 kHz FLAC.
But boy, I wish I had these Hifiman headphones when my ears were still young and I could still enjoy the full frequency range of music.
Looks like your ears' hearing profile matches the psychoacoustic models underlying lossy compression algorithms very closely.
That's the thing many people don't understand - lossy audio compression works better for you the more your ears match the average human ear.
In my case, being an older fuck with slight hearing deficiencies, I don't match this profile as closely. That's why I require higher bitrates (or lossless compression such as FLAC) for music to sound high quality.
So yeah - listening experience isn't just a matter of taste, it's highly subjective and will vary from person to person. For people like me, the difference between low-res streaming and FLAC is very noticeable, and ironically not because my ears are better than yours, but because they're worse. :)
Yeah. On second thought, that's even better. A shitty 80s boombox covered with band stickers is the ultimate way to listen to punk music. Sitting on table along with a dirty ashtray and a couple of empty beer bottles.
Crappy punk music should be listened to from vinyl anyway.
Unfortunately, Spotify's streaming quality is rather low, even if you pay for a monthly subscription.
I switched to Tidal when I bought a dedicated DAC and a pair of very highend headphones and have not regretted it - you can hear the difference on good gear.
ARTE is easily the best thing on German television that ever happened. Great documentaries, culture, music, just shitloads of great content if you're not a brain dead sitcom-with-canned-laughter consumer.
If you can't even prove that a concept has the slightest bit of truth to it, you have no right to command others not to say things about it that you don't like.
I'm not very attractive, but my butthole is very good.
I'm really trying very hard not to complain, after all I was born in Germany, the country responsible for the worst genocide in human history. I feel like I don't have the right to complain - so let me at least EXplain:
I'm 49 years old. I absolutely hate our Nazis (which sadly do exist). Always did, always will.
In the early 1990s, I participated in a student exchange to Paris - and my host family was Jewish. They were amazing people, but I was 15 and didn't know much about our history back then. To this day, I remember the face of the dad who greeted me, showed me my room and told me they were Jewish. Who knows how many of his relatives had been killed by Germans? And I was this spoiled brat who knew fuck all and was just interested in playing video games. Makes me cringe to this day.
Last year I went to the Netherlands on vacation. Sat on a park bench in Zaanse Schans, looking at windmills. Old guy asked me if he could sit beside me. We start talking. Turns out his Jewish dad fled from the Nazis to Mexico. Bam - one moment you mind your own business, the next you're in a delicate, very serious conversation. I clumsily tried telling him all I felt in that moment, the infinite sadness in my heart about Nazi crimes and I couldn't find the right words.
These things happen. It's not easy, but I try to do my part.
I despise the Nazis for impacting so many lives. I know my problems are minute compared to the impact Nazi crimes had on their victims. But what I'm also saying is that it really hurts to read comments like "Germany loves its nazis" on here when I hate them so much.
collapsed inline media