These days I tend to navigate more towards services that pay more to the artists for streams. In this I've found Tidal to be a good combo of lossless and master level audio with also a higher amount of money going to the musicians per stream. It actually also has pretty good suggestions and other stuff once you've first used for a little while, which was the biggest reason I've stayed with Spotify til now.
Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
221–230 of 717 posts
Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
#222Who knew I would be locked into Spotify not by the music quality, but by playlists, friends, apps using it, and their Discovery mechanisms. Apple and Tidal may have awesome quality, but apps like https://musicleague.app/ have gotten me through Lockdown, and it turns out that these value props are very strong. I always thought I would instantly switch to a service for its audio quality, but then again, I can also buy…
Agreed - Spotify's UI is bad and getting worse, and its quality is meh, but its discovery features are top notch and it has the biggest catalog. I have audiophile equipment - $900 MSRP Hifiman headphones, discrete DAC and amp - and I tried Tidal to see if I could hear a difference. 99% of the time, I can't... and Tidal's MQA format is questionable anyway. (Not sure about Apple's "ALAC" either.) I used a playlist impo…
Dude their adding/removing songs from the Liked Songs list is ridic haha. They had the heart button right next to where you scroll. It's been idiotic for years. How can a company like that have such an obvious flaw in the UI?
Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
#223Does anyone have any idea how spatial audio will work orientation-wise with music?
Existing spatial audio on iOS+AirPods puts the center channel (dialog) coming from your device, which makes sense since you're actively looking at it.
But I listen to music while walking around the house. I'm constantly changing orientation.
Does this mean the center channel will always be directly in front of me and therefore the "band" will always be moving/panning with me?
That seems like it would destroy a big part of the spatial audio appeal in movies, that the sound stays in the same physical location when you move your head. But if they don't, how do they decide where the sound comes from?
Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
#224Wouldn't lossless Audio need to be some kind of analog? Or some fourier transformations? Isn't the quantization of digital already a loss over the continous nature of sounds? I have no clue about audio.
Short answer: no. Digital audio can reproduce analog audio flawlessly already. Chris "Monty" Montgomery has some excellent videos on the topic that I was coincidentally listening to just this morning. This Verge article sums it up and links to his really excellent talks.
https://www.theverge.com/2015/11/6/9680140/chris-montgomery-...
Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
ALAC and FLAC are technically very similar formats [1]. Both are bit-perfect. Compare with MQA which is utter garbage and has absolutely zero to do with losless. MQA is actually, objectively worse than 16 bit audio CDs. An abject failure backed by an aggressively anti-science company backed up by a bunch of lawyers. [1] Both encode a PCM stream using linear prediction while storing the difference between the predicto…
Just to add to this comment, the video breakdowns I've watched on MQA are interesting listens even as someone who doesn't use Tidal. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRjsu9-Vznc -- Critque of MQA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwZ5hDzQ5Jg -- in defense of MQA At the end of the day, people should listen to what they think sounds good (is this an opinion?). If a placebo makes someone enjoy something more, is it really…
That's not really the point here - if someone says "I like how this sounds with (MQA artifacts | tube distortions | +20 dB bass)", that's perfectly fine and not something many if any people would argue with.
Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
#226Earlier quoted context omitted.
> There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". On the contrary, you can actually do these tests yourself ( https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2015/06/02/411473508/... ). I and many others running good high end gear can repeatedly score well on these tests. Of course, it's not only the…
> Of course, it's not only the compression that's at stake-- it's also the mastering quality. HN threads on lossless music so often descend into "well, you couldn’t hear the difference". But historically a key reason for people to prefer e.g. SACD releases of recordings is not because one can hear the extra frequencies of this format, but because the SACD release – being targeted at people with a good stereo and sile…
For anyone bored and looking to explore: https://dr.loudness-war.info/
Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
#227Wouldn't lossless Audio need to be some kind of analog? Or some fourier transformations? Isn't the quantization of digital already a loss over the continous nature of sounds? I have no clue about audio.
I understand that the lossless part is only the compression from the original digital file: what you play is bit by bit what the publisher uploaded. Just like BMP vs JPEG. Not about maintaining the analog resolution.
Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
#228Wouldn't lossless Audio need to be some kind of analog? Or some fourier transformations? Isn't the quantization of digital already a loss over the continous nature of sounds? I have no clue about audio.
In this context, lossless just means "the same quality as it was originally recorded in, which is sufficiently high for all practical purposes". And since our hearing only goes up to 20kHz, if you record at a sample rate of 44.1kHz -- just above the Nyquist frequency -- you'll be able to faithfully reproduce the original audio to within the precision afforded by your bit depth (generally 16 or 24 bit). Sort of like how a RAW image is considered lossless because it contains every single pixel captured, even though it can only represent finitely many distinct colors and cannot zoom in infinitely far with no degradation.
Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
#229From the article: > J Balvin said: [...] With Lossless, everything in the music is going to sound bigger and stronger but more importantly, it will be better quality. [...] There have been tests showing we cannot hear the difference between minimally lossy audio (e.g. mp3 320kbps) and lossless. But Balvin can. And it sounds "bigger and stronger". The extra quality of lossless is nice when mixing/remixing the sound, a…
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Re: Apple Music Announces Spatial Audio and Lossless Audio
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I and many others running good high end gear can repeatedly score well on these tests. I, too, run high-end gear and cannot. The problem scope isn't simply reproduction accuracy, it is also one of taste: Different compression can elevate/alter parts of the sound, and your opinion may not lean to the highest bit rate but rather some other coloring of the music. The fact you've run this test "repeatedly" actually hur…
Why does any of this matter? The point of a blind ABX test (and the whole question) is to see whether you can tell the difference between two formats. If you can, you can. Personally, I stop being able to tell somewhere around 200 kbit MP3s (with cheap equipment), anything above that is wasted space. You can run the tests as much as you want, if the hypothesis is that "people can't tell the difference between lossles…
>anything above that is wasted space
Having lossless copies is still useful for storage and later transcoding. Even if you can't hear a difference between a 192kbit/s MP3 and a higher bitrate lossless file, you might be able to hear one after reencoding the MP3 using another lossy format.