this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2023
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First off, Youtube Music only does up to 256kbps AAC, which is similiar in quality to Spotify's Ogg/Vorbis 320kbps.
Secondly, if you're on android, for example, and are not using Tidal or USB Audio Player PRO with Deezer or Qobyz, you're never getting true lossless because everything is being resampled to 48 000 Hz.
Also, not everybody can hear the difference between mp3 320kbps and lossless, but everybody can hear good equipment vs bad equipment on either format. 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 just edited the post, I could have sworn it was lossless but you're right.
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
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.
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
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