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."

Comments

Speaking of phones ...

[UnknownSoldier]

Has anyone compared wired to wireless quality? Are there any blind A/B tests comparing the built-in DAC of the iPhone using wired headphones vs wireless? And also the built-in DAC with an external DAC?

i.e.
I'm wondering how much better quality a dedicated DAC and/or DAC+AMP is such as the Schiit Modi 3 (DAC) + Schiit Magni 3 (AMP) ?

Back on Topic: There is a reason us audiophiles ripped everything to FLAC in the first place. So we would never have to re-encode it. The problem is Apple pushed their own proprietary lossless format, ALAC instead of embracing open standards such as FLAC.

Good to see streaming services finally embracing FLAC.

Also, could one of the editors at least PLEASE fix (*) this clickbait: The higher you go with audio file resolution, the better it gets.

It should read: The higher you go with audio file resolution, the better it gets, with decreasing returns.

i.e.
I doubt most people could tell the difference between variable 320 kbps (kilobits/s) and CD quality even with quality headphones for most music -- unless it is Classical or Jazz.

(*) Yeah, yeah, I know the editors have been a joke around here for ~20 years.

Re:Speaking of phones ...

[FrankSchwab]

>>> I doubt most people could tell the difference between variable 320 kbps (kilobits/s) and CD quality even with quality headphones for most music

Well, back in the day when we were encoding with pirated copies of the Fraunhofer codec, I actually tested this. I created an audio CD with 4 sets of DDD tracks - one classical, one Rolling Stones, one solo piano, one something else. Each set had five tracks - the first track was the uncompressed CD-rip, and following this (in a random order that only I knew) were another copy of the uncompressed CD-rip, 96 kbps, 128 kbps, and 256 kbps CBR MP3 encoded then decoded tracks. I handed out disks to a dozen of my engineering coworkers, and asked them to take them home, put them in the cd-player on their high-end stereos and come back and tell me what the order of the tracks were.

It was comical. Half of them didn't even guess, because they admitted that it would be a random guess. Almost everyone could identify the 96kbps track, but no one could tell the difference between 128, 256, and uncompressed. One guy hooked it up to his home oscilloscope and spectrum analyzer - he noted that he could easily identify that the tracks were different, but he couldn't identify which was which except for the uncompressed one - he could see on the waveforms that it was identical to the uncompressed first track.

Now, I fully believe that it's possible for some golden-eared listeners to be able to tell 128kbps from flac - and I believe that it's possible for some to train themselves to tell the difference (though I don't know why you'd want to torture yourself for the rest of your life by doing that). But my ears in my early 30's couldn't tell the difference, and my ears now can't tell the difference, so I'm really happy playing my music through whatever electronics I happen to have around, although I am willing to pay for good speakers because those I can tell a difference.

Re:Quasi-religious nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought a sony CDP-101 when they first came out. The thing about CD's back then was they painstakingly tried to get everything perfect to showcase the dynamic range. I recall one classical CD I have where I can hear the conductor hit something with the baton. Telarc would find ultra quiet mic preamps. I could hear the HVAC system on some. Now it is squish everything up to 11. It is sad really as the technology of today would allow for fantastic realism with zero compression.

Re:Most people can't tell the difference in A/B te

[lsllll]

While that may be true, in my experience most people don't care about the loss in the lossy compression, because they don't listen on anything that can portray the difference anyways. This more and more people are buying high-end HiFi equipment, while may be true, is not due to their interest in high fidelity music. After all, "Kanye's" music is crap to begin with. It may have to do with population growth, the price of electronics having come down, etc.

Not sure what they mean by HiFi equipment anyways. The most important pieces of an audio setup are the source material and the speakers. Everything in between does a descent job of handling the signal in most cases. But you can't buy a Sony A/V receiver and call it HiFi. I don't see ANY of my friends spending anywhere near what I paid for my audio setup, which is actually very modest and all second/third hand to begin with. Like I said, the most important parts for me were the speakers, and my NHT 3.3s cost $1200/$2000 I spent on my setup (excluding the source materials). You can get a very descent DAC to piggy back on top of a Raspberry PI for a complete setup of

My friends, however, don't do any critical listening to begin with. As such, a bluetooth speaker at home does just fine for them. If they want to sit and listen to something, they'll most likely do it on their 5.1 A/V receiver that has little satellites and a subwoofer. At that point, playing a lossless FLAC vs. playing a 192Kbs MP3 doesn't make a difference to them.

At the end of it all, though, is whether you get enjoyment out of whatever you have in front of you, whether it'd be your car, your spouse, your job, or your stereo. If your car drives fine for you, then that's all that matters. If the music coming out of your stereo sounds good to you, that's all that's needed. After all, some other person will look at my audio setup and laugh, because they believe they have higher quality audio coming out of their speakers than I do, and that's fine, because that's what makes them happy, and my setup is what makes me happy.

Re:Quasi-religious nonsense

[Luthair]

Maybe relevant for you - https://people.xiph.org/~xiphm...

Re:Most people can't tell the difference in A/B te

[Locke2005]

That's a references to this Gizmodo article: https://gizmodo.com/audiophile... Yeah, for short cable lengths, any sufficiently large diameter wire works fine.

Re:Quasi-religious nonsense

[bill_mcgonigle]

There are biases on remasters too. Listen to the Black Sabbath Paranoia remaster, for instance. Yeah, there's a lot of cleanup and some clarity from DRC but the high-hats are nearly impossible to hear on some tracks, even when they're providing the syncopation. Total WTF - who buys this shit?

Re:Quasi-religious nonsense

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought a sony CDP-101 when they first came out. The thing about CD's back then was they painstakingly tried to get everything perfect to showcase the dynamic range. I recall one classical CD I have where I can hear the conductor hit something with the baton. Telarc would find ultra quiet mic preamps. I could hear the HVAC system on some. Now it is squish everything up to 11. It is sad really as the technology of today would allow for fantastic realism with zero compression.

Exactly!

I have found it absolutely ridiculous that the trend toward ultra-compressed "Everything Louder than Everything Else" started AFTER we finally got a playback medium that covered 95% of the dynamic range of human hearing.