this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2025
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Unfortunately, Spotify's streaming quality is rather low, even if you pay for a monthly subscription.
I switched to Tidal when I bought a dedicated DAC and a pair of very highend headphones and have not regretted it - you can hear the difference on good gear.
I have great gear, I have FLACs, I have 180g records, and I have Spotify, and they all sound fine. Perhaps I come from a time when 192 mp3s were what you downloaded, but IMO if it's a 320 mp3 or above it sounds the same. Only time I ever noticed and appreciated a difference was when sampling or mixing, and then higher quality can be appreciated, but if I'm just cranking tunes, Spotify, FLAC, or vinyl, really makes no difference, they all drown out the ringing in my ears just fine.
Looks like your ears' hearing profile matches the psychoacoustic models underlying lossy compression algorithms very closely.
That's the thing many people don't understand - lossy audio compression works better for you the more your ears match the average human ear.
In my case, being an older fuck with slight hearing deficiencies, I don't match this profile as closely. That's why I require higher bitrates (or lossless compression such as FLAC) for music to sound high quality.
So yeah - listening experience isn't just a matter of taste, it's highly subjective and will vary from person to person. For people like me, the difference between low-res streaming and FLAC is very noticeable, and ironically not because my ears are better than yours, but because they're worse. :)
Same. In my younger days, I couldn't really tell much difference between mp3 and CD. Now? I can absolutely tell.
Yea, 320mp3 sounds close but if the music has a lot of very low or very high frequency music, mp3 seems to clip it off, even 320.
Opus seems to handle the extreme ranges better though. But if you have an MP3, and convert it, it's no better. Converting lossy to lossy is a no win outcome.
Yep, converting lossy to a lossless format won't magically bring back what was lost during the lossy compression.
Changing from Spotify to Tidal absolutely makes sense if you're sensible to these differences, because Spotify's best possible quality basically equals Tidal's worst (320 kbps lossless). Well, and Tidal's max quality is 24bit 192 kHz FLAC.
But boy, I wish I had these Hifiman headphones when my ears were still young and I could still enjoy the full frequency range of music.
I listen to punk music recorded on crappy gear, so I prefer not to hear it hi-fi.
Crappy punk music should be listened to from vinyl anyway.
Or cassette
A dirty cassette that you found on the floor of a Pontiac Fiero.
Yeah. On second thought, that's even better. A shitty 80s boombox covered with band stickers is the ultimate way to listen to punk music. Sitting on table along with a dirty ashtray and a couple of empty beer bottles.