Headphones

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A community for discussion around all topics related to headphones and personal audio.

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Why in tarnation do people use Spotify? (alien.top)

submitted 1 year ago by superglue_chute115@alien.top to c/headphones@hi-fi.community

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I don't understand why people buy these nice and expensive headphones only to use Spotify, arguably the worst quality music streaming service that exists. It sounds so bad compared to Apple Music, YouTube Music, Tidal, Deezer, or even Napster. At least you are getting lossless sound with those, it won't be the same as having a ripped flac from a CD but anything is better than the AAC 128/320kbps that Spotify offers. It just bothers me when I see photos of headphones on this sub and then they have Spotify open in the background, I just can't understand!

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[–] superglue_chute115@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

First off, Youtube Music only does up to 256kbps AAC, which is similiar in quality to Spotify's Ogg/Vorbis 320kbps

I just edited the post, I could have sworn it was lossless but you're right.

Just because people aren't going endgame extracting everything the human senses can catch from sound waves doesn't mean they're dumb or wasting money.

I don't mean to make anyone sound dumb, truly. I don't actually care what people use, it doesn't concern me, however in my experience there is a huge difference between AAC and High Res FLAC and to be honest I thought everyone could tell the difference since it's night and day for me

[–] El-Rocha@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

since it's night and day for me

Mind if I ask how did you A/B compare?

A lot of times between different services (and sometimes in the same service), the lossy and lossless versions of songs come from completely different masters, so what you might be hearing is the different in the quality of the original production and not the different of compression.

[–] superglue_chute115@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

On Android, Windows, and Linux I played a song on Spotify, then played a song with Tidal (Cider for Apple Music didn't do lossless back then). I would pause and play on each and Tidal was just fuller sounding for every song I tested. Modern day Cider sounds better than Tidal now for some reason

[–] nipsen@alien.top 1 points 1 year ago

Most of the time we're really talking about the same master mixing target ending up in different formats, though. And although that's usually different enough to hear, it's not necessarily just better to hear the difference in quality of some of the sample tracks.. or the quality of the noise, the filters on the microphone(and weaknesses of the microphone used), the scratching in the chair, hairs on the bow, flicking of valves, super high definition scratching on strings, and things like that.

If people actually do dig up original mastering tapes to resample them to higher resolution than was done earlier - then that's great, though. And if a composer or a producer ends up deliberately targeting loss-less with both their samples and then the final mixing target as well, then all of those things would of course add something here that you could potentially enjoy and listen to -- that really would be different and better.

But I don't think that actually is what happens even some of the time. :p