![]() ![]() I rarely use a laptop or PC for any of this, other than hosting. I host my own 24bit/192khz/etc hires files, as well as stream & play SACDs on my Marantz. I dont do youtube audio, or amazon, and I dont use Apple but have tried iTunes hires. Tidal customer since 2018(volume normalization OFF, or it will mess with your experience.) Spotify customer since 2011 (just canceled). I have extensive experience with many audio / video streaming apps on a few different hardware systems. Tidal and Spotify come at a special discount for €5 per month. Tidal and Spotify with their podcasts and content back on top. I find more specific playlists created, I find it easier to find songs and I find it more convenient. This is perhaps one of the reasons I chose to stay on Spotify. For my varied tastes I have everything I’m looking for on Spotify and tidal. tidal in hifi without normalising sound so similar to me, if not the same when listening critically, that I can’t even imagine what they will sound like if I play music just to leave it in the background. Spotify in maximum quality without normalising vs. Sometimes one platform sounds better to me, sometimes another. Now we have millions of songs in the palm of our hand. ![]() I’ve realised that fuck…not so long ago, 6 years ago you had to buy albums one by one. In the end I have made the decision to keep Spotify premium. Just use whatever you, the listener, think sounds better, since that’s really what matters in the end Even if you feel you can’t discern the difference now, there’s a good chance you will later with more experience, and regardless it’s also now something you don’t have to think about so piece of mind if you don’t really care how it sounds in the end But otherwise, if it’s the same recording and mastering, just go lossless if possible. My take on this is to just go with lossless if possible, doesn’t have to be high res or whatever other format, just regular redbook lossless, but in the end the quality of the recording and mastering is going to be more important, so if there’s a subpar master in lossless vs a higher quality master in lossy, I wouldn’t be surprised if some will prefer the lossy simply due to the better master. Objectively lossless audio is better than lossy, there’s no arguing that, if it’s actually noticeably audible to the person listening really depends on the listener, music, and gear at hand, but really I think you’ll find the majority of people in this hobby (or at least enough to be statistically significant) to agree lossless generally is noticeably better most of the time, and to claim that all to boil down to placebo is lazy and questionable justification for an opinion Generally I think in most cases even with average quality recordings for music the difference between lossless vs lossy is pretty clear once you know what to listen for and once you get a decent audio setup to replay that. On some recordings it may be incredibly apparent in a decent system, on others it might be negligible, comes down the quality of the recording in the end. Since ABX has been thrown around alot, once you learn to listen between the differences for lossy vs lossless audio with a decent quality recording, it becomes fairly easy to tell the difference and it becomes basic pattern recognition. I know that the way these streaming service programs interface with the dac can differ as well so that’s another potential thing to account for Is it just me or has nobody mentioned that the versions and mastering between these streaming services can differ between each one? Not every streaming service has the same master or recording of a specific track/album so that’s another thing to consider when accounting for this difference.
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