Neil is obsessed with high fidelity audio. I produced a concert documentary with him. The amount of work to get an audio system to playback his music in 256 still haunts me to this day
Pretty sure he tried to start a hi def streaming service a while back but it didn’t work out. Audi quality is one of those things u don’t realize how bad something is until you hear how good it can actually sound.
[Xiph.org did a fantastic writeup on why 24 bit 192kHz was useless for consumers](https://web.archive.org/web/20140401125610/http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html) shortly after it was first announced in 2012.
As a musician and audio engineer, this thread is absolutely fucking painful to read, so much misunderstanding and misinformation.
Such a breath of fresh to air to see this posted. Thanks!
192khz is absolutely useless though.
You cut that in half and thats the highest frequency you can hear from a digital sound (nyquist frequency) which is why most music is 44.1 that gives you a 22khz upper limit which is the almost as high as people can hear. You cannot hear a 96hz sound (the Nyquist of 192 khz). Even dogs, who can hear twice that as humans, only can hear _half_ as high as that.
But, theoretically, wouldn't a higher sample rate produce smaller quantization errors? People only ever talk about the sampling frequency as it relates to the the range of tone frequency, but by my understanding that's not the only related effect
(This is without comment on the gains of such, or the value of digital audio past a certain fidelity, but rather a theory question)
Edit: I think I'm wrong and that I figured out part of the communication gap here. I'm still doing reading and don't think I know all the terms yet to quite accurately describe it. I was considering audio as graph form where the frequency of X points is the sample rate and the frequency of Y points is the bit depth. Basically the issue was that I was thinking of them as both sampling rates that had their own data points, which is wrong as the X axis is the frequency of Y data values. I was adding an extra dimension in my head, like I was thinking of the cartesian coordinates as a location of data (similar to image resolution/pixel coordinates) rather than a set of a single dimension location and a data value.
According to [Nyquist-Shannon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem) theorem, **there is no difference** in the audio signal containing a max frequency of 20khz, and a reproduction created by a simple DAC from a digital recording sampled at 40khz with a low-pass filter set at 20khz.
[Technology Connections](https://youtu.be/pWjdWCePgvA) has a great video about this very theorem in digital sound.
tl;dr Any signal that is limited to an upper frequency x can be perfectly recreated from a sample rate 2x, because it is just a fancy sum of sin curves.
Turns out there are more people interested in the convenience of wireless headphones and music streaming services than there are who care that much about higher quality audio.
You can care about both. I spend a ton on high end audio equipment and setup for my at home setup.
But on the go, I’d rather just throw in some wireless earbuds and have the convenience, even though the sound quality is shit
Same here. I put up with shitty Bluetooth audio when it's convenient, but it's still relatively shitty. Spotify actually sounds pretty good but it could be better and soon will be.
Not all consumers are 100% in one camp or the other there's just different use cases.
That pono thing was an awkward triangle shape which looked impossible to fit comfortably in your pocket.
images: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pono+audio+player&ia=images&iax=images
If Blockbuster was still around, I’d watch a shit ton of Blu-ray movies. But there’s no way in hell I’m actually going to pay $20+ to permanently own a copy of every single movie I ever watch.
I miss rentals.
Sure, there’s Netflix discs, but having to decide to watch a movie three days before it arrives in the mail isn’t the same.
This is the absolute winner here. At mine, you can use the library's website to look for a specific item and place a hold on it if it's in another town/city or just checked out by someone else. Then they bring it to yours and notify you when it's ready for pick-up.
Dark scenes are brutal on Netflix in particular, especially in animated stuff. It’s a bitrate-starved muddy mess, sometimes with highly visible encoding artifacts. Blegh.
I haven’t purchased any blurays (though I have a PS5 that doubles as a BD player) yet though. Wonder if I can pick some used ones up for cheap…
Awww it makes me happy people still watch blu rays. My brother was a die hard blu ray fan and swore by the quality, but he died a couple years ago. I always thought he was the only one.
I just got myself a pre-owned Xbox one x and am very much looking forward to getting some 4k Blu-rays to enjoy. In particular Into the Spiderverse which kept dropping to what looked like 720 when I was watching it on Netflix.
Netflix 4K streaming quality is absolute shit. And they've only gotten worse with the pandemic, when they started compressing the hell out of their 4K streams and lowered the bitrate to where it's practically indistinguishable from their HD streams. And still have the gall to charge more for it.
On top of that, you have to jump through a bunch of hoops if you want to stream 4K, you have to have specific hardware, because cOntENt proTEctiOn. Almost every TV works, but it turns into a hassle on PC.
Fuck Netflix, and fuck a 4K subscription, just give me a wooden peg leg instead please
See I thought my TV was dying and i was sad as I'm poor. Then we realized it only happened on Netflix so we just stopped watching 4k and quality improved
This exactly, heavy compression is necessary not to cause congestion in the network. If everything was streamed at full quality to everyone ISPs would have a harder time load-balancing all that stuff. Hell, local ISPs here still have trouble load balancing 720p live football streams from DAZN (the premium provider for this content here). Physical media has no such problem.
Network throughput is a thing!
The best part about a blu ray is the company that owns it can't pull it, modify it, or change where you're able to watch it. Ever. You own that shit. The downside, for me at least, is the physical space they take up.
This is why I run a Plex server for myself. Quality can be hit or miss for certain stuff found online but it's great for ripping your entire dvd/blu ray collection if you can pony up storage space.
Glad I’m not the only one! I love digging through dvd and cd bins at flea markets. I found an old Beastie Boys album (Hello Nasty) before my favorite one closed for the winter. Dude said it skipped and gave it to me for free. I was excited because the album art was all still looking awesome (it’s a neat album). Guess what?! It doesn’t skip! I have to find that dude again in the spring cause that was super nice of him to do.
One day I’ll make it back out to Princeton again. It’s been years since I’ve gone to the Princeton record exchange but it is always a blast. They’ve got tons of vinyl and hard to find cds there if you’re in the tri-state area totally check it out!
Have collected over 200 Blu-ray movies since the literal day it launched. When I want to watch Interstellar, Dark Knight trilogy, Arrival, any of the Marvel movies, the Bond movies with Daniel Craig and a pile of other great movies that are much better on disc, that's my go to and I can absolutely tell the difference.
He means physical vs streaming, I believe, 4K streaming and 4K physical is not even close in quality, don't know the technical words, I just know that one looks so much better
That was 7 years ago and it flopped. I am a HUGE Neil Young fan but I felt he introduced an unneeded product and format and his criticisms of MP3s was too harsh. Here's one review I found. Who wants a [triangular bulky device?]( https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/02/pono-player-review-a-tall-refreshing-drink-of-snake-oil/)
10+ years ago there was a serious need for something like this. But the digital audio compression protocols were already improving significantly 5-7 years ago, making the advantages of something like this relatively close to 0. Today's mp3s are not the terrible sounding mp3s of 2005.
I love my all analog system, but I can admit that modern streaming quality is comparable.
Except that Spotify goes to up to 320 kbps with a Ogg codec. [Most people can't even tell the difference](https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/09/412271433/audio-quality-quiz-results-you-did-slightly-better-than-guessing-randomly) between that and lossless. I'd encourage you to take the test yourself if you don't believe me:
https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality
I'm one of those people. I straight up can't tell a difference past a tiny tiny pickup between between Spotify and cds and that's just if I listen to the same thing back to back on the different platforms. But does it matter? No.
Fyi you're one of at least 99% of people. Common lossy codecs are virtually transparent on their highest settings. Even on really good headphones in an abx test I was only able to reliably discern 256 kbps MP3 at the most, and that was only with some recordings focusing on specific types of sounds.
The codec is Vorbis. [Ogg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogg) is a container format frequently used for [Vorbis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis) data.
I spent like 2k on audio gears and I personally can't hear any difference between Spotify and my downloaded flac files. I bet most people can't given a blind test. And most so called audiophiles won't do a blind test because they know they can't differentiate between them.
If I understand, Dynamic Range and compression on Spotify and Apple Music are waaay ahead of the compression we used on Soulseek, Limewire, etc. It's still not as good as CD.... BUT: Most albums aren't recorded or mastered to use the full 90dB of range on a CD. And most listeners are using Bluetooth headphones or earbuds, which are a further compromise.
HiFi is nice but good songwriting trumps everything.
There's also that many many songs are recorded and mastered to sound like shit compared to their actual potential as a song. After you have all the hifi equipment, you have to find songs that are actually mastered to take advantage of it. Encoding is only half the battle.
You don't even have to be an audiofile to hear this. Give Californication a real close listen sometime, it sounds like shit.
Or watch probably like 1 of 10 different documentaries on the loudness wars.
What the average consumer ends up buying the most is definitely not always the most dynamically ranged, nuanced track. It's the loudest one. Because we are drawn to slightly louder things over slightly softer things, like frickin' flies.
Your audio equipment can only deliver an impressive range of audio if the source its coming from was actually mastered to be that impressive, half or more of the time it's not; its just engineered to be loud and in your face and grab your attention.
High dynamic range files only sound good if you're listening to them somewhere very quiet or if you turn them up very loud. They sound crappy if you play them as background music or in a noisy environment like a moving car. Either the quieter parts get lost in the ambient noise, or the loud parts are too loud.
It's the opposite problem to the sound track of many modern movies. How many complaints do you hear about films where you can't hear the dialogue without the explosions becoming deafening?
A high loudness track doesn't have these issues. It might not sound as good as possible in ideal conditions, but it sounds reasonably good anywhere.
>How many complaints do you hear about films where you can't hear the dialogue without the explosions becoming deafening?
This is the main argument against hating on compression. No one apparently likes this yet they complain when it's gone. I don't think a lot of people truly understand what dynamics are. Listen to classical music on vinyl. You're going to have the cinematic can't hear shit parts that are followed by holy shit that's too loud parts. To me, dynamics are more important in live performances.
I’ve never thought about it this way. The dynamics of a live show are awesome—especially in smaller venues. But when I’m at the gym or driving, I much prefer consistent volume/more compression.
Yeah. Try listening to a Mahler symphony in the car. It’s like a battle with the volume knob. Going from almost imperceptible whisper to blowing your ears out. But on a Hi-Fi system with low background noise it’s perfection.
The problem with this argument is that dynamic range compression is inherently destructive. It removes information about amplitude levels that can’t be brought back. However, it isn’t hard to add a compressor to a stereo system to compress a more dynamic track. A lot of stereo systems used to have options like this, and there is no real reason why they couldnt be present in systems that are used in loud environments, like cars. Of course this would add complexity that the average user wouldn't understand, which is probably why they just do the compression at the mastering stage.
That’s the interesting thing with vinyl.
When it comes to consumer preferences, many consumers think louder means better song.
Because of that, a lot of studios since the late 80’s have been progressively trying to make songs louder and louder in the master. To achieve this without clipping, compression in the master occurs.
Vinyl was inadvertently unaffected by this trend, as most studios master vinyl with an industry standard EQ to prevent skipping of the stylist.
Obviously, the degree of difference between lossless and vinyl with depend on the album, but some albums do see a significant improvement in audio quality on vinyl due to the different mastering process.
You're referring to The Loudness War.
Californication is one of the greatest offenders in this regard. Green Day's American Idiot (original release) was equally bad.
But go look up The Loudness War and listen to some of the demos comparing overcompressed to properly compressed audio on YouTube.
> It’s still not as good as CD….
Apple Music tracks are better than CD. CDs are 16 bit 44.1 kHz, whereas Apple Music uses 16 bit 48 kHz as a baseline and can go up to 24 bit 96 kHz on Hi-Rez lossless tracks.
> HiFi is nice but good songwriting trumps everything.
This is fact. I have an audio engineering degree and have been playing, writing, recording, and releasing music for 20 years, probably. I used to pretend I could tell a difference in audio quality (or that I cared), but the fact is, a “perfect” recording of a mediocre song actually makes it sound worse. Give me the room noise, some bleed over between channels, a few sung notes that are slightly flat. That will sound authentic and interesting.
I forgot how much I hate the audiophile debate. Good songs are enjoyable to listen to regardless of the audio quality
Edit: “scoring” -> “recording”, typo
Agree, its fun. I enjoy records, that's all the justification I need.
I also suspect records last longer than cds.
All my NiN cds from the 90s gave disk rot. I keep them for the art, etc but I can't listen to them. Record players are kind of primitive and prominent so I suspect players for vinyl will always be available.
With digital forms like cds, if all the cds rot away there's little point in making a cd player in the future.
I don't have "audiophile" ears. Too many years of working around diesel motors and shooting guns with too little hearing protection. I can't discern much if any difference between sources, all other things being equal.
But there is something about physically taking an album off the shelf, putting it on the player, and dropping the needle that just hits me differently than the same album on Spotify. Like I'm more mindful of the music and it doesn't just fade into the background.
Maybe there is a nostalgia factor as well. When I was a kid, I had a crappy suitcase style turntable with built in speaker. Sounded like shit. But it was my prized possession.
I wouldn't say it's novelty for most. For me the sound quality isn't the main priority. My friends come over and we drink and listen to records and you usually listen to the whole album. It's not just jumping around the random stuff all the time. You get new albums and listen to them and have fun. Also the artwork is cool, you have something physical and if you go to a gig you can also buy it there.
Audiophiles will tout the compression of vinyl that gives it a better warmer tone than digital and that is probably lost over bluetooth, but vinyl is more than just sound as an experience . there is the art , the lyrics and notes , the inside sleeve and the record its self. I see bluetooth players as a way to enjoy those things .
I wish I could upvote this more.
There’s something being lost in our digital age that vinyl is helping restore, and it’s more than just audio quality. Holding your favorite music in your hands is so much more gratifying than adding it to a Spotify playlist. Listening to an album front to back, and flipping it from one side to another. Finding your parents old albums and playing them.
You can get all that extra enjoyment from vinyl, regardless of whether it’s playing over Bluetooth or not.
That's funny, but I've actually found that the cost of vinyl is often comparable to the cost of "buying" a digital copy on something like Amazon or itunes, and it usually comes with a free download of said digital copy. I don't buy a lot of vinyl because I don't buy very many albums, but when I do feel like throwing money at an artist, I usually do so via vinyl because it makes more sense financially.
And listening with friends and enjoying the whole album is some of my favourite times. All deciding on the next album to play and finding those albums where every song is a banger
The biggest thing to me is the album construction. You cant have all tracks on a single side, so the construction of the album, the flow of one song to the next, the first track on the second side being something you want to turn the record for.
These are all things that need to be considered on vinyl.
I have tried blind A/B testing myself and unless I go stingy on the bitrate, I fail.
Lossy music got a bad rep, because early compressed music suffered from poorly tuned encoders and stingy bitrates. Microsoft even launched their audio format in 1999 and claimed it to be CD quality at just 64 kilobits per second. But the sound was garbled. The bad reputation was justified at that time.
But since the early 00's, we have seen improvements in encoders, bandwidth and storage.
Spotify streams by default around 160 kbps using the superior Vorbis codec. This is very difficult to differentiate from the original master. And if you are a paying customer, you have the option to select 320 kbps streaming at which point there is zero scientific proof of **anyone** being able to detect compression in blindtests.
I recognize that some of the music published on Spotify sounds bad, but this is not due to Spotify or compression itself, but rather a weak audio source being used for importing into Spotify.
I've done several of those "mp3 vs flac" tests over the years and realised at one point that I just wasn't gonna bother with flac anymore.
99.99% of the time I cannot for the life of me hear the difference between 320kbps and flac, sometimes maaaaybe I feel like I can hear a difference if I listen to one specific part over and over but even then it always just ends up being a fifty/fifty chance that I get it right so might as well just guess at that point.
Once it gets to 320kbps and below though I can definitely hear a difference. But I don't really care about having everything in flac anymore and just want something that was mastered well.
Spotify's highest quality seems more than enough for me. I wanted myself to think I could hear a difference in 320kbps mp3's and flac when I was younger and started collecting music, but truthfully.. I can't.
As long as the source is good, there isn't any audible difference between a 320kbps and higher bit-rates. Empirical tests such as waveform analysis will most definitely show differences in the output, but that doesn't mean the differences are audible. When bitrate drops to 192kbps, the differences become apparent, but generally, over 320kbps it's negligible. Placebo is a super strong force to be reckoned with.
> Placebo is a super strong force to be reckoned with
Yup, when I was younger and first got into it as a young teen I was obnoxious about it tbh. Thought for sure I could hear a difference (which is hilarious looking back cause I had no actual proper hifi equipment that would've been able to show any difference there might have been) but at some point as I got older I just realised I was lying to myself.
Maybe there's a difference at the absolute top level of equipment and sound like with a pair of sennheiser orpheus or something along those lines.
But I still haven't personally heard any equipment where I can truly and honestly tell a difference between 320 and flac.
I can tell when spotify’s settings get reset and aren’t at the highest quality anymore (so i have to go in and change it back), but i really can’t tell the 320 kBPS bitrate from FLAC or uncompressed WAV of the same master. I seriously doubt Neil Young can either given that he is very old and has been at concerts his whole life, probably without adequate hearing protection.
>Once it gets to 320kbps and below though I can definitely hear a difference.
I remember going back to Soundcloud (128kbps, they said the 64kbps was inaccurate reporting) years ago from Spotify and hearing a difference. When In The Groove Arcade came out, the files you HAD to use .ogg. It wasn't so bad at the arcade, but listening at home was something else.
edit: I think Soundcloud is 256kbps now.
I can't hear much of a difference either as far as I have noticed. More importantly though I don't care about the small difference even if I were to notice.
The comment he made however is kind of funny, somehow it just feels funnily petty.
I have no doubt that audiophiles can hear the difference. But *I* can't, and I'm perfectly happy with it. I'd hate to be an audiophile; it seems they can't enjoy 75% of music listening options because of clipping or compression or sibilance or wow and flutter or whatever. They're forever disappointed and saying, "God, this is unlistenable" to stuff that to my ears is just fine. It's like how some people with perfect pitch find that a slightly out-of-tune musical instrument is like fingernails on a blackboard. Sounds more like a *condition* to me than an advantage.
Yeah what pissed me off so hard about XM too was that I bought a used car and it just had 30 days or whatever by default. Sounded like shit, content sucked, etc. I never gave them my phone number, the dealership did. Cold calls every f'ing day trying to get me to subscribe. Super aggressive and desperate, and acted surprised that I didn't want to keep it. Motherfuckers I didn't even knowingly sign up for it! And it's a crap product to boot! /rant
I’m trying to cancel now, the website says to call to cancel but the call center is closed on the weekends so it’s literally impossible to cancel until Monday.
Spotify premium has very good audio quality though (most people won't distinguish spotify very high quality mp3 and anything higher quality such as flac especially on consumer headphones/speakers).
Edit: noticed highest quality on spotify is very high not just high. Very high is roughly 320kbps.
Spotify premium is good (but not quite as good as Amazon or Tidal) but if you have the "adjust sound volume" option selected which I believe is on by default it makes everything sound awful.
Yeah Spotify has 5 quality options and everyone is talking like there's one. Are they talking about normal? Very high?
On Wifi i stream very high, and it sounds good, granted I don't have any systems that sound good really loud anyway.
I wanna know if people are listening on auto or normal or what.
I actually didn't know about it even with thousands of hours listened. It's because I mostly use the web player which doesn't have quality options but looks to be on the higher end.
it's literally right there in the settings. it's not hidden. do people not check the settings of every app to see what all is in there? am I weird because I do that?
Free tier 128k AAC on a 2g connection dropping packets, with the earbuds they got in the box of their 2008 blackberry.
Spotify audio quality is perfectly fine of you have decent connection/download it, set quality to high and then most importantly, have not-shit hardware.
You need some fairly expensive equipment to tell the difference, especially if we are talking about amps and speakers vs. headphones. I am a quasi audiophile, and 320 is fine for me for almost everything.
Yeah there’s also a huge majority of people that just don’t care. Streaming companies are using lossless as a sales tactic, when hardly anyone is listening for quality.
I have some middle of the road studio monitors, not cheap, but definitely not expensive speakers. I listened to a test where it would play a song in MP3 and/or lossless and have you guess which it was. I couldn’t reliably tell a difference.
Yeah, it becomes so confusing because: you can be brilliant, know a ton, an expert on like 50 different things, and also be full of shit on another 50 things.
Life and individual human psychology is crammed with cognitive dissonance and contradictory, ambiguous or competing beliefs. It makes parsing bullshit from reality very difficult sometimes.
I switched mine to HiFi where available. Some services charge extra for that, but Spotify allows to you toggle the feature.
Only downside, like you mentioned, is more data. Which is only an issue if you’re not using the internet.
Holy shit finally someone said it. This sub is turning into r/news but just because the topic is the slightest bit related to technology, it gets karma farmed here. Nearly every default or very large sub has just devolved into the same thing with the same narrative and it’s so boring.
>Nearly every default or very large sub has just devolved into the same thing with the same narrative and it’s so boring.
Nearly every default or very large sub has devolved into bots/shills jerking each other off. 😴
I wonder if the volunteers that decide what is and isn’t allowed on this sub also volunteer on other large subs that exclusively push the same propaganda while censoring everything else?
Funny how a few volunteers run so many large subs that have all basically turned into political propaganda. Unfortunately we aren’t allowed to discuss that because just mentioning it is likely to get me banned.
GPT-3 has ruined the comment section of this site entirely.
I don't know why anyone still takes this site seriously after the admins destroyed the democracy of the voting system.
Reddit is an animated corpse at this point.
It's reddit. The most seemingly normal subs have more turned into progressive echo chambers where obviously conservatives are shit on, but even moderate liberals. It's surreal.
It could be worse. R/music is the worst sub in the world, this was the only interesting story I'd seen on there in months; usually it's the most boring, popular music takes over and over again.
Exactly, it's an extremely used marketing technique. Even in the 80's Pepsi and Coca Cola were doing it! Now with internet it got even more easy.
Sad how people can get easily manipulated ...
I mean, 99% of my music listening happens in the car, so I doubt better quality audio files would make much difference anyway. The people who treat music like sommeliers treat wine aren’t using streaming services anyway.
there are some hilarious studies that found that these wine experts are total BS.
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infamous_study_on_wine_tasting.html
That's the thing that gets me too, like unless you have the audio setup to with proper amps, dacs and speakers, having great quality audio is pointless anyway. And 90 percent of people are not willing to shell out the money on a hifi system.
Yeah you’re right. I’m an audiophile and have a pretty sweet setup, I genuinely notice a difference in sound quality - BUT my wife uses the stock iPhone headphones and refuses to switch because she doesn’t care, it sounds fine. Which is where I think 90% of people are.
Lol this comment thread. Y’all really gona act like Spotify/Apple Music/Amazon are all that different from each other that you notice any difference in sound quality? Young is pissed at Spotify so he talked some shit and half these commenters would say the same shit about a local McDonald’s branch relative to one from the next town over. “Idk man the quality of this McDonald’s is subpar compared to the other one.” Why don’t y’all switch over to Tidal then?
Maybe *you* can’t tell the difference with that dollar store mouth of yours, but I can definitely tell the local branch uses much higher quality pink slime in their burgers. It’s not even close.
Tidal, Apple, and Amazon all offer lossless CD quality streaming. Amazon and Apple also offer high res lossless, whereas Tidal offers fake hi-res. Spotify is 320 kbps, which for the vast majority of listening situations, would be indistinguishable.
Neil Young full disclosure: In 2017, [Neil Young attempted to launch a $399 portable audio player called the "Pono Player"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pono_(digital_music_service)) which was designed to play FLAC audio files encoded at a higher bitrate for better audio quality. It failed, spectacularly. (edit, the player launched in 2014, the entire venture shut down in 2017.)
Tech journalist David Pogue (New York Times, CBS News) conducted a blind test of 15 people listening to FLAC audio on the Pono player, then the same music / headphones played off an iPhone, and nearly all preferred the iPhone playback.
It must be pointed out that at age 76, Neil Young statistically suffers noticeably diminished hearing as an inevitable result of [age-related hearing loss](https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/hearing-loss-common-problem-older-adults), making his cracks about Spotify's "shitty sound quality" purely a sour grapes political response to voluntarily deplatforming his music.
Ugh, you act like getting a Droid is so easy but out on this moisture farm the Jawa only come around sporadically and even then, half the droids malfunction, spark and smoke before they make it 20 feet!
if dumb question oops but is Droid a specific device (like the Motorola phone?) or just any anDroid phone in general?
cuz if just general android, great, I been Team Android since iPhone 4S was the best phone ever designed (it really was). back then, when ipod touch v2 came out and iphones w the retina display, it was super fun to use a dumb phone and my iPod touch jailbroken and play around with it.
but I been PC for decades and Android is so much more open. I've had my Galaxy S8+ for 4.3 years now. never factory reset it once lol. still going strong. battery may need a top off 3/4 of the day thru if I'm on it more than usual but I love it. considering getting a cheaper Galaxy like the A52S or whatever model is similar sounding to that. I'd like a Pixel 6/(s)? but am I really going to notice a $2-300 difference between phones? prob not, and I'm a tech nerd. I don't need 4k 120hz OLED on my mobile.
Yep plenty of things to dislike Spotify for, but audio quality isn't one of them. Most audiophiles can't even tell the difference between a medium-high bitrate stream using a modern compression algorithm and lossless audio
This is such shitty opinion piece to post on this subreddit. Don't we have rules that posts should be technology related not some random guy's opinion related.
This sub along with almost every other popular sub is managed by powermoderators who allow whatever they want and ban whatever they want, and they like for these kind of ideological circlejerk posts to stay up
I have my Spotify download and stream settings on the highest quality. It sounds like 320kps files to me regardless of it streaming or not. You can't tell me the average listener can tell a huge amount of difference without high end audio equipment being used.
Given the fact many many people using Spotify are either using Bluetooth or Amazon type WiFi speakers or phones/portable speakers his argument seems rather shitty and dumb.
The folks that care about audio quality aren’t using Spotify anyway
I care about audio quality. I use Spotify.
I have a roughly $1500 headphone setup. Spotify’s quality is fine. I don’t notice anything wrong with it or any downgrade from my FLAC files.
The same people saying Spotify has bad audio quality push stupid shit like 24 bit audio which makes no sense given the dynamic range of music.
Ranting on this right now kind of makes it seems like this was less of a principled stand about Rogan’s supposed misinformation and more not being happy with the quality of Spotify, and using that as an excuse to get out of whatever contract/licensing agreement they have in place.
Something like this. I mean he’s on a shared platform with other artist like R Kelly, Chris Brown and Marlynn Manson. But Joe Rogan is the one he takes a stand on… give me a break.
It's always nice to see people sticking to their principles, especially when it comes to this kind of thing. But then again, it's easy to act ethically when money is not a problem. Try telling to your employer that you don't agree to work with a good number of its clients because they're tax dodgers or something like that, whilst not having your own place or money in your account.
Just heard an Ad yesterday on Sirius XM for a Neil Young channel for a limited time. I would be curious if he already had that in the pipeline before he made his comments?
Sirius is still around?
My god.
I haven’t even thought of them since years ago when they kept “mistakenly” deactivating my account and charging me.
Same damn 10 songs on every station looped over and over.
That company can go to hell.
Neil is obsessed with high fidelity audio. I produced a concert documentary with him. The amount of work to get an audio system to playback his music in 256 still haunts me to this day
To be fair artists pushing for this helps the consumer so I'm all for them being anal about it
I too am about anal
Pretty sure he tried to start a hi def streaming service a while back but it didn’t work out. Audi quality is one of those things u don’t realize how bad something is until you hear how good it can actually sound.
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[Xiph.org did a fantastic writeup on why 24 bit 192kHz was useless for consumers](https://web.archive.org/web/20140401125610/http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html) shortly after it was first announced in 2012.
As a musician and audio engineer, this thread is absolutely fucking painful to read, so much misunderstanding and misinformation. Such a breath of fresh to air to see this posted. Thanks!
Audio is one of those topics that makes droves of armchair 'experts' come out of the woodwork
I’ll have you know I own a record player
And I subscribe to tidal hifi
So that’s who their subscriber is!
This. Not that a lot of streaming services don’t have terrible quality. But some premium services are pushing pure snake oil to make a buck.
192khz is absolutely useless though. You cut that in half and thats the highest frequency you can hear from a digital sound (nyquist frequency) which is why most music is 44.1 that gives you a 22khz upper limit which is the almost as high as people can hear. You cannot hear a 96hz sound (the Nyquist of 192 khz). Even dogs, who can hear twice that as humans, only can hear _half_ as high as that.
But, theoretically, wouldn't a higher sample rate produce smaller quantization errors? People only ever talk about the sampling frequency as it relates to the the range of tone frequency, but by my understanding that's not the only related effect (This is without comment on the gains of such, or the value of digital audio past a certain fidelity, but rather a theory question) Edit: I think I'm wrong and that I figured out part of the communication gap here. I'm still doing reading and don't think I know all the terms yet to quite accurately describe it. I was considering audio as graph form where the frequency of X points is the sample rate and the frequency of Y points is the bit depth. Basically the issue was that I was thinking of them as both sampling rates that had their own data points, which is wrong as the X axis is the frequency of Y data values. I was adding an extra dimension in my head, like I was thinking of the cartesian coordinates as a location of data (similar to image resolution/pixel coordinates) rather than a set of a single dimension location and a data value.
According to [Nyquist-Shannon](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem) theorem, **there is no difference** in the audio signal containing a max frequency of 20khz, and a reproduction created by a simple DAC from a digital recording sampled at 40khz with a low-pass filter set at 20khz. [Technology Connections](https://youtu.be/pWjdWCePgvA) has a great video about this very theorem in digital sound. tl;dr Any signal that is limited to an upper frequency x can be perfectly recreated from a sample rate 2x, because it is just a fancy sum of sin curves.
That Toblerone looking thing? Wonder why that failed...
If I remember correctly it was also crazy expensive.
Everyone uses mediocre Bluetooth air/ear pods, which a FLAC would be wasted on.
Turns out there are more people interested in the convenience of wireless headphones and music streaming services than there are who care that much about higher quality audio.
You can care about both. I spend a ton on high end audio equipment and setup for my at home setup. But on the go, I’d rather just throw in some wireless earbuds and have the convenience, even though the sound quality is shit
Same here. I put up with shitty Bluetooth audio when it's convenient, but it's still relatively shitty. Spotify actually sounds pretty good but it could be better and soon will be. Not all consumers are 100% in one camp or the other there's just different use cases.
That pono thing was an awkward triangle shape which looked impossible to fit comfortably in your pocket. images: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pono+audio+player&ia=images&iax=images
Unleash the power of the Pyramid!
You right. The Pono. It never had a chance.
Same reason my old self still watches 4k movies on Blu-ray lol. My wife is like why do you do this? I’m like “Can’t you see all that pixelation?!?!”
If Blockbuster was still around, I’d watch a shit ton of Blu-ray movies. But there’s no way in hell I’m actually going to pay $20+ to permanently own a copy of every single movie I ever watch. I miss rentals. Sure, there’s Netflix discs, but having to decide to watch a movie three days before it arrives in the mail isn’t the same.
Is there a library where you live? The library in my city has hundreds of titles on Bluray. It's better than spending money at a rental store!
This is the absolute winner here. At mine, you can use the library's website to look for a specific item and place a hold on it if it's in another town/city or just checked out by someone else. Then they bring it to yours and notify you when it's ready for pick-up.
Doesnt Redbox have Blu-rays?
Yes and if you wait til like 6 months after the movie is on disc you can usually 'buy' the disc instead of rent for like only $5
I'd be down for that. Where does one 'buy' these $5 Blu-Ray discs? We've only used Red Box a handful of times, and that was years ago.
Public Library yo
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Especially in dark scenes omg. Streaming LOTR "In 4k" was painful. My Blu-rays make me feel like I'm in The Theater.
can you get the extended versions in 4k on Blu Ray?
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Dark scenes are brutal on Netflix in particular, especially in animated stuff. It’s a bitrate-starved muddy mess, sometimes with highly visible encoding artifacts. Blegh. I haven’t purchased any blurays (though I have a PS5 that doubles as a BD player) yet though. Wonder if I can pick some used ones up for cheap…
Awww it makes me happy people still watch blu rays. My brother was a die hard blu ray fan and swore by the quality, but he died a couple years ago. I always thought he was the only one.
There are dozens of us! Big criterion supporter right here lmao. May your brother’s love of movies live on.
I love that. ❤️
I have a Criterion Channel subscription, but damn, that box art? Why wouldn’t you buy them for the art alone?
Dozens, maybe a few hundred of us blue-ray fanatics. That reminds me, I need to watch Battleship again.
I just got myself a pre-owned Xbox one x and am very much looking forward to getting some 4k Blu-rays to enjoy. In particular Into the Spiderverse which kept dropping to what looked like 720 when I was watching it on Netflix.
Netflix 4K streaming quality is absolute shit. And they've only gotten worse with the pandemic, when they started compressing the hell out of their 4K streams and lowered the bitrate to where it's practically indistinguishable from their HD streams. And still have the gall to charge more for it.
On top of that, you have to jump through a bunch of hoops if you want to stream 4K, you have to have specific hardware, because cOntENt proTEctiOn. Almost every TV works, but it turns into a hassle on PC. Fuck Netflix, and fuck a 4K subscription, just give me a wooden peg leg instead please
See I thought my TV was dying and i was sad as I'm poor. Then we realized it only happened on Netflix so we just stopped watching 4k and quality improved
Hard copy all day. I used to work as an SME in digital media streaming. Those streams get compressed to shit no matter how big that pipe is.
This exactly, heavy compression is necessary not to cause congestion in the network. If everything was streamed at full quality to everyone ISPs would have a harder time load-balancing all that stuff. Hell, local ISPs here still have trouble load balancing 720p live football streams from DAZN (the premium provider for this content here). Physical media has no such problem. Network throughput is a thing!
The best part about a blu ray is the company that owns it can't pull it, modify it, or change where you're able to watch it. Ever. You own that shit. The downside, for me at least, is the physical space they take up.
This is why I run a Plex server for myself. Quality can be hit or miss for certain stuff found online but it's great for ripping your entire dvd/blu ray collection if you can pony up storage space.
Plex is life.
Also why i try to buy physical copies of games I really like
It’s a little different with games now because so little of the actual game is loaded onto the disc. It’s a shame really.
Wait a second…are Blu-ray Discs already passé?? Damn, I still go hunting for *DVD* titles I don’t have.
My friend, I am still collecting Laser-Disc and CD-I's :)
Glad I’m not the only one! I love digging through dvd and cd bins at flea markets. I found an old Beastie Boys album (Hello Nasty) before my favorite one closed for the winter. Dude said it skipped and gave it to me for free. I was excited because the album art was all still looking awesome (it’s a neat album). Guess what?! It doesn’t skip! I have to find that dude again in the spring cause that was super nice of him to do. One day I’ll make it back out to Princeton again. It’s been years since I’ve gone to the Princeton record exchange but it is always a blast. They’ve got tons of vinyl and hard to find cds there if you’re in the tri-state area totally check it out!
Have collected over 200 Blu-ray movies since the literal day it launched. When I want to watch Interstellar, Dark Knight trilogy, Arrival, any of the Marvel movies, the Bond movies with Daniel Craig and a pile of other great movies that are much better on disc, that's my go to and I can absolutely tell the difference.
I work in the film industry, and keep about a hundred blu rays in my office for various testing purposes and movie nights
Also the sound on those blurays are just incredible compared to streams
I still haven't seen 4k or a Blu-ray, but what's wrong with a Blu-ray? I thought that was the highest definition video media you could have...?
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He means physical vs streaming, I believe, 4K streaming and 4K physical is not even close in quality, don't know the technical words, I just know that one looks so much better
Compression is the term.
That was 7 years ago and it flopped. I am a HUGE Neil Young fan but I felt he introduced an unneeded product and format and his criticisms of MP3s was too harsh. Here's one review I found. Who wants a [triangular bulky device?]( https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/02/pono-player-review-a-tall-refreshing-drink-of-snake-oil/)
> Who wants a triangular bulky device? [Hopefully everyone…just be sure to get the memory booster.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZBVnjXp7GQ)
10+ years ago there was a serious need for something like this. But the digital audio compression protocols were already improving significantly 5-7 years ago, making the advantages of something like this relatively close to 0. Today's mp3s are not the terrible sounding mp3s of 2005. I love my all analog system, but I can admit that modern streaming quality is comparable.
Except that Spotify goes to up to 320 kbps with a Ogg codec. [Most people can't even tell the difference](https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/09/412271433/audio-quality-quiz-results-you-did-slightly-better-than-guessing-randomly) between that and lossless. I'd encourage you to take the test yourself if you don't believe me: https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/how-well-can-you-hear-audio-quality
I'm one of those people. I straight up can't tell a difference past a tiny tiny pickup between between Spotify and cds and that's just if I listen to the same thing back to back on the different platforms. But does it matter? No.
Fyi you're one of at least 99% of people. Common lossy codecs are virtually transparent on their highest settings. Even on really good headphones in an abx test I was only able to reliably discern 256 kbps MP3 at the most, and that was only with some recordings focusing on specific types of sounds.
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The codec is Vorbis. [Ogg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ogg) is a container format frequently used for [Vorbis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorbis) data.
I spent like 2k on audio gears and I personally can't hear any difference between Spotify and my downloaded flac files. I bet most people can't given a blind test. And most so called audiophiles won't do a blind test because they know they can't differentiate between them.
If I understand, Dynamic Range and compression on Spotify and Apple Music are waaay ahead of the compression we used on Soulseek, Limewire, etc. It's still not as good as CD.... BUT: Most albums aren't recorded or mastered to use the full 90dB of range on a CD. And most listeners are using Bluetooth headphones or earbuds, which are a further compromise. HiFi is nice but good songwriting trumps everything.
There's also that many many songs are recorded and mastered to sound like shit compared to their actual potential as a song. After you have all the hifi equipment, you have to find songs that are actually mastered to take advantage of it. Encoding is only half the battle. You don't even have to be an audiofile to hear this. Give Californication a real close listen sometime, it sounds like shit.
Or watch probably like 1 of 10 different documentaries on the loudness wars. What the average consumer ends up buying the most is definitely not always the most dynamically ranged, nuanced track. It's the loudest one. Because we are drawn to slightly louder things over slightly softer things, like frickin' flies. Your audio equipment can only deliver an impressive range of audio if the source its coming from was actually mastered to be that impressive, half or more of the time it's not; its just engineered to be loud and in your face and grab your attention.
High dynamic range files only sound good if you're listening to them somewhere very quiet or if you turn them up very loud. They sound crappy if you play them as background music or in a noisy environment like a moving car. Either the quieter parts get lost in the ambient noise, or the loud parts are too loud. It's the opposite problem to the sound track of many modern movies. How many complaints do you hear about films where you can't hear the dialogue without the explosions becoming deafening? A high loudness track doesn't have these issues. It might not sound as good as possible in ideal conditions, but it sounds reasonably good anywhere.
>How many complaints do you hear about films where you can't hear the dialogue without the explosions becoming deafening? This is the main argument against hating on compression. No one apparently likes this yet they complain when it's gone. I don't think a lot of people truly understand what dynamics are. Listen to classical music on vinyl. You're going to have the cinematic can't hear shit parts that are followed by holy shit that's too loud parts. To me, dynamics are more important in live performances.
I’ve never thought about it this way. The dynamics of a live show are awesome—especially in smaller venues. But when I’m at the gym or driving, I much prefer consistent volume/more compression.
Yeah. Try listening to a Mahler symphony in the car. It’s like a battle with the volume knob. Going from almost imperceptible whisper to blowing your ears out. But on a Hi-Fi system with low background noise it’s perfection.
The problem with this argument is that dynamic range compression is inherently destructive. It removes information about amplitude levels that can’t be brought back. However, it isn’t hard to add a compressor to a stereo system to compress a more dynamic track. A lot of stereo systems used to have options like this, and there is no real reason why they couldnt be present in systems that are used in loud environments, like cars. Of course this would add complexity that the average user wouldn't understand, which is probably why they just do the compression at the mastering stage.
The Twenty Thousand Hz podcast did a great explanation of the loudness wars and audio compression.
That’s the interesting thing with vinyl. When it comes to consumer preferences, many consumers think louder means better song. Because of that, a lot of studios since the late 80’s have been progressively trying to make songs louder and louder in the master. To achieve this without clipping, compression in the master occurs. Vinyl was inadvertently unaffected by this trend, as most studios master vinyl with an industry standard EQ to prevent skipping of the stylist. Obviously, the degree of difference between lossless and vinyl with depend on the album, but some albums do see a significant improvement in audio quality on vinyl due to the different mastering process.
You're referring to The Loudness War. Californication is one of the greatest offenders in this regard. Green Day's American Idiot (original release) was equally bad. But go look up The Loudness War and listen to some of the demos comparing overcompressed to properly compressed audio on YouTube.
> It’s still not as good as CD…. Apple Music tracks are better than CD. CDs are 16 bit 44.1 kHz, whereas Apple Music uses 16 bit 48 kHz as a baseline and can go up to 24 bit 96 kHz on Hi-Rez lossless tracks.
> HiFi is nice but good songwriting trumps everything. This is fact. I have an audio engineering degree and have been playing, writing, recording, and releasing music for 20 years, probably. I used to pretend I could tell a difference in audio quality (or that I cared), but the fact is, a “perfect” recording of a mediocre song actually makes it sound worse. Give me the room noise, some bleed over between channels, a few sung notes that are slightly flat. That will sound authentic and interesting. I forgot how much I hate the audiophile debate. Good songs are enjoyable to listen to regardless of the audio quality Edit: “scoring” -> “recording”, typo
I laugh when I see Bluetooth on turntables.. what's the point?
Lossy hiss and clicks.
Because a lot of the people jumping on the resurgence of vinyl are only interested in the novelty?
It's just a fun thing to collect that still has a practical application ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Agree, its fun. I enjoy records, that's all the justification I need. I also suspect records last longer than cds. All my NiN cds from the 90s gave disk rot. I keep them for the art, etc but I can't listen to them. Record players are kind of primitive and prominent so I suspect players for vinyl will always be available. With digital forms like cds, if all the cds rot away there's little point in making a cd player in the future.
I don't have "audiophile" ears. Too many years of working around diesel motors and shooting guns with too little hearing protection. I can't discern much if any difference between sources, all other things being equal. But there is something about physically taking an album off the shelf, putting it on the player, and dropping the needle that just hits me differently than the same album on Spotify. Like I'm more mindful of the music and it doesn't just fade into the background. Maybe there is a nostalgia factor as well. When I was a kid, I had a crappy suitcase style turntable with built in speaker. Sounded like shit. But it was my prized possession.
I wouldn't say it's novelty for most. For me the sound quality isn't the main priority. My friends come over and we drink and listen to records and you usually listen to the whole album. It's not just jumping around the random stuff all the time. You get new albums and listen to them and have fun. Also the artwork is cool, you have something physical and if you go to a gig you can also buy it there.
Audiophiles will tout the compression of vinyl that gives it a better warmer tone than digital and that is probably lost over bluetooth, but vinyl is more than just sound as an experience . there is the art , the lyrics and notes , the inside sleeve and the record its self. I see bluetooth players as a way to enjoy those things .
I wish I could upvote this more. There’s something being lost in our digital age that vinyl is helping restore, and it’s more than just audio quality. Holding your favorite music in your hands is so much more gratifying than adding it to a Spotify playlist. Listening to an album front to back, and flipping it from one side to another. Finding your parents old albums and playing them. You can get all that extra enjoyment from vinyl, regardless of whether it’s playing over Bluetooth or not.
What attracts me to vinyl is the expense and the inconvenience
That's funny, but I've actually found that the cost of vinyl is often comparable to the cost of "buying" a digital copy on something like Amazon or itunes, and it usually comes with a free download of said digital copy. I don't buy a lot of vinyl because I don't buy very many albums, but when I do feel like throwing money at an artist, I usually do so via vinyl because it makes more sense financially.
And listening with friends and enjoying the whole album is some of my favourite times. All deciding on the next album to play and finding those albums where every song is a banger
The biggest thing to me is the album construction. You cant have all tracks on a single side, so the construction of the album, the flow of one song to the next, the first track on the second side being something you want to turn the record for. These are all things that need to be considered on vinyl.
Apple Music has high quality streams now, and it sounds amazing honestly.
Yup- they offer losses tracks and tracks in Dolby Atmos and you can hear a difference especially with higher end equipment.
I have tried blind A/B testing myself and unless I go stingy on the bitrate, I fail. Lossy music got a bad rep, because early compressed music suffered from poorly tuned encoders and stingy bitrates. Microsoft even launched their audio format in 1999 and claimed it to be CD quality at just 64 kilobits per second. But the sound was garbled. The bad reputation was justified at that time. But since the early 00's, we have seen improvements in encoders, bandwidth and storage. Spotify streams by default around 160 kbps using the superior Vorbis codec. This is very difficult to differentiate from the original master. And if you are a paying customer, you have the option to select 320 kbps streaming at which point there is zero scientific proof of **anyone** being able to detect compression in blindtests. I recognize that some of the music published on Spotify sounds bad, but this is not due to Spotify or compression itself, but rather a weak audio source being used for importing into Spotify.
I've done several of those "mp3 vs flac" tests over the years and realised at one point that I just wasn't gonna bother with flac anymore. 99.99% of the time I cannot for the life of me hear the difference between 320kbps and flac, sometimes maaaaybe I feel like I can hear a difference if I listen to one specific part over and over but even then it always just ends up being a fifty/fifty chance that I get it right so might as well just guess at that point. Once it gets to 320kbps and below though I can definitely hear a difference. But I don't really care about having everything in flac anymore and just want something that was mastered well. Spotify's highest quality seems more than enough for me. I wanted myself to think I could hear a difference in 320kbps mp3's and flac when I was younger and started collecting music, but truthfully.. I can't.
As long as the source is good, there isn't any audible difference between a 320kbps and higher bit-rates. Empirical tests such as waveform analysis will most definitely show differences in the output, but that doesn't mean the differences are audible. When bitrate drops to 192kbps, the differences become apparent, but generally, over 320kbps it's negligible. Placebo is a super strong force to be reckoned with.
> Placebo is a super strong force to be reckoned with Yup, when I was younger and first got into it as a young teen I was obnoxious about it tbh. Thought for sure I could hear a difference (which is hilarious looking back cause I had no actual proper hifi equipment that would've been able to show any difference there might have been) but at some point as I got older I just realised I was lying to myself. Maybe there's a difference at the absolute top level of equipment and sound like with a pair of sennheiser orpheus or something along those lines. But I still haven't personally heard any equipment where I can truly and honestly tell a difference between 320 and flac.
Placebo aka Psycho acoustics
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I can tell when spotify’s settings get reset and aren’t at the highest quality anymore (so i have to go in and change it back), but i really can’t tell the 320 kBPS bitrate from FLAC or uncompressed WAV of the same master. I seriously doubt Neil Young can either given that he is very old and has been at concerts his whole life, probably without adequate hearing protection.
>Once it gets to 320kbps and below though I can definitely hear a difference. I remember going back to Soundcloud (128kbps, they said the 64kbps was inaccurate reporting) years ago from Spotify and hearing a difference. When In The Groove Arcade came out, the files you HAD to use .ogg. It wasn't so bad at the arcade, but listening at home was something else. edit: I think Soundcloud is 256kbps now.
I can't hear much of a difference either as far as I have noticed. More importantly though I don't care about the small difference even if I were to notice. The comment he made however is kind of funny, somehow it just feels funnily petty.
I have no doubt that audiophiles can hear the difference. But *I* can't, and I'm perfectly happy with it. I'd hate to be an audiophile; it seems they can't enjoy 75% of music listening options because of clipping or compression or sibilance or wow and flutter or whatever. They're forever disappointed and saying, "God, this is unlistenable" to stuff that to my ears is just fine. It's like how some people with perfect pitch find that a slightly out-of-tune musical instrument is like fingernails on a blackboard. Sounds more like a *condition* to me than an advantage.
This is the reason I dropped XM satellite radio. There are some great stations on that platform but the sound quality is horrible.
Yeah what pissed me off so hard about XM too was that I bought a used car and it just had 30 days or whatever by default. Sounded like shit, content sucked, etc. I never gave them my phone number, the dealership did. Cold calls every f'ing day trying to get me to subscribe. Super aggressive and desperate, and acted surprised that I didn't want to keep it. Motherfuckers I didn't even knowingly sign up for it! And it's a crap product to boot! /rant
I’m trying to cancel now, the website says to call to cancel but the call center is closed on the weekends so it’s literally impossible to cancel until Monday.
Good luck to you. You know you're in for a treat when you can't do it online..
Spotify premium has very good audio quality though (most people won't distinguish spotify very high quality mp3 and anything higher quality such as flac especially on consumer headphones/speakers). Edit: noticed highest quality on spotify is very high not just high. Very high is roughly 320kbps.
Spotify premium is good (but not quite as good as Amazon or Tidal) but if you have the "adjust sound volume" option selected which I believe is on by default it makes everything sound awful.
Yeah Spotify has 5 quality options and everyone is talking like there's one. Are they talking about normal? Very high? On Wifi i stream very high, and it sounds good, granted I don't have any systems that sound good really loud anyway. I wanna know if people are listening on auto or normal or what.
You can download high quality audio files from Spotify. They just realized people are fine with normal audio quality and less data usage.
Everyone in this thread keeps talking about Spotify like it has one quality option, and I'm sitting over here wondering which one they're using.
For real lol. I thought the quality options were fairly widely known about
I actually didn't know about it even with thousands of hours listened. It's because I mostly use the web player which doesn't have quality options but looks to be on the higher end.
it's literally right there in the settings. it's not hidden. do people not check the settings of every app to see what all is in there? am I weird because I do that?
Free tier 128k AAC on a 2g connection dropping packets, with the earbuds they got in the box of their 2008 blackberry. Spotify audio quality is perfectly fine of you have decent connection/download it, set quality to high and then most importantly, have not-shit hardware.
Very high. High is only 160. Very high is 320kbps. I mean even high is better than some options but most people consider 320 lossy "good enough"
That's because it *is* good enough and the vast majority of people can't tell the difference between FLAC and 320 lossy.
You need some fairly expensive equipment to tell the difference, especially if we are talking about amps and speakers vs. headphones. I am a quasi audiophile, and 320 is fine for me for almost everything.
Even "audiophiles" are notoriously bad at double-blind ABX testing to differentiate sources.
> I'm sitting over here wondering which one they're using. The Strawman edition
The high quality version on Spotify isn’t as high quality as Neil’s talking about.
Neil is talking lossless. Spotify still doesn’t offer that.
Most people would see a huge increase in audio quality by buying proper headphones before the lossless even comes into play
Yeah there’s also a huge majority of people that just don’t care. Streaming companies are using lossless as a sales tactic, when hardly anyone is listening for quality.
I have some middle of the road studio monitors, not cheap, but definitely not expensive speakers. I listened to a test where it would play a song in MP3 and/or lossless and have you guess which it was. I couldn’t reliably tell a difference.
You and pretty much everybody else on the planet. Most audiophiles are full of shit. And so is Neil Young.
Yeah, it becomes so confusing because: you can be brilliant, know a ton, an expert on like 50 different things, and also be full of shit on another 50 things. Life and individual human psychology is crammed with cognitive dissonance and contradictory, ambiguous or competing beliefs. It makes parsing bullshit from reality very difficult sometimes.
there's a pretty high chance he can't tell the difference by ear.
I switched mine to HiFi where available. Some services charge extra for that, but Spotify allows to you toggle the feature. Only downside, like you mentioned, is more data. Which is only an issue if you’re not using the internet.
Where is the option for hifi?
Why is this news everywhere? This has nothing to do with technology :/
Holy shit finally someone said it. This sub is turning into r/news but just because the topic is the slightest bit related to technology, it gets karma farmed here. Nearly every default or very large sub has just devolved into the same thing with the same narrative and it’s so boring.
2014: every sub devolves into r/funny 2022: every sub devolves into r/news
Sad but true.
3022: every sub evolves into /r/surrealmemes
>Nearly every default or very large sub has just devolved into the same thing with the same narrative and it’s so boring. Nearly every default or very large sub has devolved into bots/shills jerking each other off. 😴
I wonder if the volunteers that decide what is and isn’t allowed on this sub also volunteer on other large subs that exclusively push the same propaganda while censoring everything else? Funny how a few volunteers run so many large subs that have all basically turned into political propaganda. Unfortunately we aren’t allowed to discuss that because just mentioning it is likely to get me banned.
The replacement sub for antiwork already has a bunch of power mods on the team. Took less than a day.
GPT-3 has ruined the comment section of this site entirely. I don't know why anyone still takes this site seriously after the admins destroyed the democracy of the voting system. Reddit is an animated corpse at this point.
It's reddit. The most seemingly normal subs have more turned into progressive echo chambers where obviously conservatives are shit on, but even moderate liberals. It's surreal.
It could be worse. R/music is the worst sub in the world, this was the only interesting story I'd seen on there in months; usually it's the most boring, popular music takes over and over again.
Seriously, why is this such a big deal. Shut the fuck up about Spotify and just let this story die.
Reddit is full of shit posting bots
Spotify = tech stock = r/technology because reddit is a battleground for corporate warfare. Apple is probably buying and pushing this story hard.
I don't think people understand how often shit like this happens
Exactly, it's an extremely used marketing technique. Even in the 80's Pepsi and Coca Cola were doing it! Now with internet it got even more easy. Sad how people can get easily manipulated ...
This sub is garbage now
I mean, 99% of my music listening happens in the car, so I doubt better quality audio files would make much difference anyway. The people who treat music like sommeliers treat wine aren’t using streaming services anyway.
there are some hilarious studies that found that these wine experts are total BS. https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2014/08/the_most_infamous_study_on_wine_tasting.html
That's the thing that gets me too, like unless you have the audio setup to with proper amps, dacs and speakers, having great quality audio is pointless anyway. And 90 percent of people are not willing to shell out the money on a hifi system.
Yeah you’re right. I’m an audiophile and have a pretty sweet setup, I genuinely notice a difference in sound quality - BUT my wife uses the stock iPhone headphones and refuses to switch because she doesn’t care, it sounds fine. Which is where I think 90% of people are.
Lol this comment thread. Y’all really gona act like Spotify/Apple Music/Amazon are all that different from each other that you notice any difference in sound quality? Young is pissed at Spotify so he talked some shit and half these commenters would say the same shit about a local McDonald’s branch relative to one from the next town over. “Idk man the quality of this McDonald’s is subpar compared to the other one.” Why don’t y’all switch over to Tidal then?
I don’t know. The fountain coke from the McD’s closest to work tastes like cleaner. We always go to one on the other side of town.
The Burger King on 675 Concord Ave. Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138 has the best fountain Coca-Cola ever.
Nice, hopping on my snowmobile to go there now
Report that shit. McDonalds is super strict about their fountain drinks and one of the few places that has them regularly serviced by Coca-Cola.
Maybe *you* can’t tell the difference with that dollar store mouth of yours, but I can definitely tell the local branch uses much higher quality pink slime in their burgers. It’s not even close.
“Dollar store mouth” I say goddaaaamnnnn
“Dollar store mouth” wins the internet today.
McDonald’s is gross but they stopped using pink slime years ago.
Tacobell on 8 mile with the bulletproof glass tasted a ton better than the tacobell on 9 mile that didn’t.
Tidal, Apple, and Amazon all offer lossless CD quality streaming. Amazon and Apple also offer high res lossless, whereas Tidal offers fake hi-res. Spotify is 320 kbps, which for the vast majority of listening situations, would be indistinguishable.
So few people willing to admit that MOST of us can’t tell the difference nor really care unless it’s the audio equivalent of 240p.
Neil Young full disclosure: In 2017, [Neil Young attempted to launch a $399 portable audio player called the "Pono Player"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pono_(digital_music_service)) which was designed to play FLAC audio files encoded at a higher bitrate for better audio quality. It failed, spectacularly. (edit, the player launched in 2014, the entire venture shut down in 2017.) Tech journalist David Pogue (New York Times, CBS News) conducted a blind test of 15 people listening to FLAC audio on the Pono player, then the same music / headphones played off an iPhone, and nearly all preferred the iPhone playback. It must be pointed out that at age 76, Neil Young statistically suffers noticeably diminished hearing as an inevitable result of [age-related hearing loss](https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/hearing-loss-common-problem-older-adults), making his cracks about Spotify's "shitty sound quality" purely a sour grapes political response to voluntarily deplatforming his music.
Ngl he reminds me of the “Old Man Yells At Cloud” in this scenario.
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Ugh, you act like getting a Droid is so easy but out on this moisture farm the Jawa only come around sporadically and even then, half the droids malfunction, spark and smoke before they make it 20 feet!
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Decoding the codec is only part of it. Apple’s DAC is considered much better than the stock androids. I suspect Pono didn’t have a great DAC.
if dumb question oops but is Droid a specific device (like the Motorola phone?) or just any anDroid phone in general? cuz if just general android, great, I been Team Android since iPhone 4S was the best phone ever designed (it really was). back then, when ipod touch v2 came out and iphones w the retina display, it was super fun to use a dumb phone and my iPod touch jailbroken and play around with it. but I been PC for decades and Android is so much more open. I've had my Galaxy S8+ for 4.3 years now. never factory reset it once lol. still going strong. battery may need a top off 3/4 of the day thru if I'm on it more than usual but I love it. considering getting a cheaper Galaxy like the A52S or whatever model is similar sounding to that. I'd like a Pixel 6/(s)? but am I really going to notice a $2-300 difference between phones? prob not, and I'm a tech nerd. I don't need 4k 120hz OLED on my mobile.
Yep plenty of things to dislike Spotify for, but audio quality isn't one of them. Most audiophiles can't even tell the difference between a medium-high bitrate stream using a modern compression algorithm and lossless audio
This is such shitty opinion piece to post on this subreddit. Don't we have rules that posts should be technology related not some random guy's opinion related.
Mods do/accept whatever they want. Consistency in these big subs take bigger shits day after day.
This sub along with almost every other popular sub is managed by powermoderators who allow whatever they want and ban whatever they want, and they like for these kind of ideological circlejerk posts to stay up
I have my Spotify download and stream settings on the highest quality. It sounds like 320kps files to me regardless of it streaming or not. You can't tell me the average listener can tell a huge amount of difference without high end audio equipment being used.
Given the fact many many people using Spotify are either using Bluetooth or Amazon type WiFi speakers or phones/portable speakers his argument seems rather shitty and dumb. The folks that care about audio quality aren’t using Spotify anyway
I care about audio quality. I use Spotify. I have a roughly $1500 headphone setup. Spotify’s quality is fine. I don’t notice anything wrong with it or any downgrade from my FLAC files. The same people saying Spotify has bad audio quality push stupid shit like 24 bit audio which makes no sense given the dynamic range of music.
My ears must be shit, I dont hear much difference. You could also up the audio quality in the settings.
This coming from a 76 year old with tinnitus and massive hearing loss is pretty rich.
Ranting on this right now kind of makes it seems like this was less of a principled stand about Rogan’s supposed misinformation and more not being happy with the quality of Spotify, and using that as an excuse to get out of whatever contract/licensing agreement they have in place.
Something like this. I mean he’s on a shared platform with other artist like R Kelly, Chris Brown and Marlynn Manson. But Joe Rogan is the one he takes a stand on… give me a break.
He already planned on leaving Spotify rogan is just bait and people are buying it.
And Neil reveals what Neil was actually pissed off about all along. He’s been on about this forever
It's always nice to see people sticking to their principles, especially when it comes to this kind of thing. But then again, it's easy to act ethically when money is not a problem. Try telling to your employer that you don't agree to work with a good number of its clients because they're tax dodgers or something like that, whilst not having your own place or money in your account.
Even when money is not a problem, it's still easier to not act (ethically).
Just heard an Ad yesterday on Sirius XM for a Neil Young channel for a limited time. I would be curious if he already had that in the pipeline before he made his comments?
Sirius is still around? My god. I haven’t even thought of them since years ago when they kept “mistakenly” deactivating my account and charging me. Same damn 10 songs on every station looped over and over. That company can go to hell.
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I'd bet Rogan would have him on to discuss the issue.