What would be nice is if they supported high-quality music videos along with the audio. A cap on monthly minutes would be ok. Most tracks are available on Youtube anyway.
Spotify announces HiFi, a lossless streaming tier coming later this year
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Re: Spotify announces HiFi, a lossless streaming tier coming later this year
#22AFAIK spotify premium uses 320kb/s vorbis for audio compression. I understand why you'd want lossless for archival purposes, but does it make a difference for playback? ie. can you tell the difference between 320kb/s vorbis and lossless in a ABX test?
The difference will not be audible to most people because of the equipment and environment. Besides, audio has been mastered for 128kbps MP3, which most people prefer. So unless they are going to change the mastering, this is double worthless. But I’m not in the habit of telling people how to spend their money. If they enjoy the music more because they paid more for it, no objections here. I’ve got plenty of wasteful…
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Re: Spotify announces HiFi, a lossless streaming tier coming later this year
#23AFAIK spotify premium uses 320kb/s vorbis for audio compression. I understand why you'd want lossless for archival purposes, but does it make a difference for playback? ie. can you tell the difference between 320kb/s vorbis and lossless in a ABX test?
Does it make a difference? It certainly sounds different (on my very midrange Audioengine speakers).
I certainly can't consistently identify which one is lossless in a blind test, but there is an audible difference between the same song in Vorbis and FLAC.
I don't know how useful this distinction is though.
Re: Spotify announces HiFi, a lossless streaming tier coming later this year
#24Pardon my ignorance, if I'm using using AirPods which use 256kbps AAC, will I even notice a difference here? My guess is no but I'm not super codec savvy.
Re: Spotify announces HiFi, a lossless streaming tier coming later this year
#25Is there a website that implements ABX test and blinds you to what it's playing? Then unblinding at the end?
Re: Spotify announces HiFi, a lossless streaming tier coming later this year
#26Purely marketing for the “more is better” pseudo audiophile. ABX testing blew the “lossless sounds better” mantra out of the window nearly 2 decade ago [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec_listening_test
There is a cut and dry relationship between bitrate and audio fidelity. You simply cannot encode higher frequency audio in lower bitrate samples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...
Yes, but for most codecs, bitrate is variable. For the parts where the higher frequencies are present the codec is free to bump up the bitrate and it can also scale it down for silent parts or parts with low frequencies only.
Re: Spotify announces HiFi, a lossless streaming tier coming later this year
#27Is there a website that implements ABX test and blinds you to what it's playing? Then unblinding at the end?
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Re: Spotify announces HiFi, a lossless streaming tier coming later this year
#28Purely marketing for the “more is better” pseudo audiophile. ABX testing blew the “lossless sounds better” mantra out of the window nearly 2 decade ago [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec_listening_test
There is a cut and dry relationship between bitrate and audio fidelity. You simply cannot encode higher frequency audio in lower bitrate samples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...
Nyquist is about sample rate and frequency, not bitrate and frequency.
Edit: Clearly there is generally a relationship between bitrate and quality, but for compressed audio it is far from "cut and dry".
Re: Spotify announces HiFi, a lossless streaming tier coming later this year
#29Purely marketing for the “more is better” pseudo audiophile. ABX testing blew the “lossless sounds better” mantra out of the window nearly 2 decade ago [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec_listening_test
There is a cut and dry relationship between bitrate and audio fidelity. You simply cannot encode higher frequency audio in lower bitrate samples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...
That's irrelevant because human ears aren't spectrum analyzers. Audio compression codecs exploit weakness in human perception[1] to discard data with minimal loss of subjective audio quality.
Re: Spotify announces HiFi, a lossless streaming tier coming later this year
#30Purely marketing for the “more is better” pseudo audiophile. ABX testing blew the “lossless sounds better” mantra out of the window nearly 2 decade ago [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codec_listening_test
There is a cut and dry relationship between bitrate and audio fidelity. You simply cannot encode higher frequency audio in lower bitrate samples. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli...
Too bad we have that pesky brain in the way. Human perception isn't just a matter of signal processing theory.