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Why High-Fidelity Streaming is the Audio Revolution Your Ears Have Been Waiting For (forbes.com)
From a report: While our ears may be attuned to lossy compressed audio in most everyday scenarios, the experience of rediscovering high-fidelity lossless digital audio can be nothing short of a revelation. Fine details reappear, performers have more space, sounds have more definition, audio feels warmer, sounds clearer, and is noticeably more pleasurable to listen to. The higher you go with audio file resolution, the better it gets. Thanks to the new range of streaming apps delivering CD-quality or higher, our beloved "universal jukebox" is undergoing a significant upgrade.
Consumer demand for high-resolution audio has been growing steadily, for example users of Deezer HiFi have increased by 71% in the past 12 months alone, and the product is now available in 180 countries and works with a wide range of FLAC streaming compatible devices. Bang & Olufsen's most senior Tonmeister (sound engineer) Geoff Marti believes that demand for hi-fi streaming audio is growing due to a rise in the number of people buying high-end audio devices. "It used to be that you bought an iPhone and you used the white earbuds, but nowadays people are upgrading to better headphones, so they want a better file and a better app to play it on. The potential is there for somebody that wants to get high quality, and they don't have to spend a lot of money to get it."
Consumer demand for high-resolution audio has been growing steadily, for example users of Deezer HiFi have increased by 71% in the past 12 months alone, and the product is now available in 180 countries and works with a wide range of FLAC streaming compatible devices. Bang & Olufsen's most senior Tonmeister (sound engineer) Geoff Marti believes that demand for hi-fi streaming audio is growing due to a rise in the number of people buying high-end audio devices. "It used to be that you bought an iPhone and you used the white earbuds, but nowadays people are upgrading to better headphones, so they want a better file and a better app to play it on. The potential is there for somebody that wants to get high quality, and they don't have to spend a lot of money to get it."
The same people clamoring for FLAC because of audio quality are also the same people snapping up vinyl and cassettes, and probably have already wrecked their hearing past the point of being able to tell the difference. High-end Audio is a bunch of snake oil.
It's called the loudness war for a reason. The best raw source for music will always been CDs prior to the year 2000. Every re-release after will have been compressed (audio, not digital/mathematical).
I'm all for 24-bit audio so long as it doesn't suffer from compression, otherwise a giant waste of time and money.
Life is not for the lazy.
CD-DA is generally considered lossless because most people can not tell the difference between it and an analog recording. There is of course dataloss from the A/D conversion but its not perceptible. This also applies to formats such as FLAC which are the same quality. MP3 on the other hand is inferior at any bitrate.
When talking about compression and how it ruins digital audio we have two different types. Digital compression of the data which makes it lossy, generates artifacts and reduces the frequency range. And dynamic compression which makes everything the same volume makes the volume sound flat. The first is inherent to lossy formats and the second is only related because it became common place at the same time. The loudness wars, producers competing against one another because some bad data had told labels that the loudest songs got the most attention. This of course ignores the fact that both Radio and Streaming services apply their own gain compensation and make everything the same volume regardless.
The first issue can be solved by using higher quality formats such as FLAC. The second can only be solved through remastering the tracks from the stems and deciding not to apply such brutal compression, or in many cases limiting.
Perfect digital audio has been available since the ubiquitous availability of CDs. The problem is that nearly no recording studio or producer seems to be able to use that technology properly to its full extent.
Encoding the garbage most producers put out today will simply put out garbage again. As long as the input to the encoders is not hifi, it does not matter how many bits you waste on it.
You claim DTS sounds "way better" and has "more fidelity", but what's the basis for that comparison? So far as I know, no albums have been mastered using DTS Surround (or DTS-HD Master Audio and the like), so you couldn't have done any A/B testing from the same material, which leads me to believe that you declared a winner after watching some random movies and listening to some random CDs. I imagine that's exactly the sort of quasi-religious nonsense that the OP was railing against.
To be fair, DTS Surround (i.e. what I assume you're talking about, since it's the standard DTS codec, as opposed to the extensive list of other DTS technologies that support 5.1 channels) does have better fidelity than an audio CD (24-bit at 48 kHz vs. 16-bit at 44.1 kHz), but the OP was saying—and as someone with decades of experience mixing sound (though not professionally, lest anyone think I'm an expert), I'm inclined to agree—that most people can't tell the difference. Blind tests have shown repeatedly that most people can't reliably pick the better one between lossless and a 128 kbps MP3, and among those that can, only a vanishingly small number can still pick the better one consistently once you bump it up to 192 kbps for the MP3. I'd wager that the number who could pick the better between DTS Surround and CD audio would be similarly small.
That doesn't mean people have defective ears; it just means there are limits to what we can perceive. Just as the printer dpi wars became meaningless once we got beyond the human eye's ability to perceive a difference, so too did the camera megapixel wars eventually become meaningless, so too did the display ppi wars become meaningless (despite ongoing marketing), and so too have these audio fidelity wars become meaningless.
I mean, seriously, where do you think that CDs are coming up short? They're already capable of a larger dynamic range (~90 dB) than what you can get in a concert hall (~80 dB), they already capture frequencies (0 Hz to 22.05 kHz) that are both below and above what people can hear (20 Hz to 20 kHz), and they already have enough detail that the vast majority of the population is incapable of picking the better audio at better than chance would allow.
You're welcome to have preferences, of course. A lot of people love pumping up the bass (see Beats headphones). Maybe you prefer the "warmer" sound that's popular among the audiophile crowd (hence why it's become known as the "audiophile" sound). Maybe you prefer a brighter or punchier sound. But with any of those preferences, you need to be aware that you're actually reducing the fidelity by moving away from what was originally there, in much the same way that adding cream or sugar takes you away from the original flavors in your tea or coffee. For my part, I've generally leaned towards a "reference" sound (i.e. as close to the original as possible), but I'm weird that way, since most people find it unpleasant to listen to and end up suffering ear fatigue as a result.