„Audiophiles don’t use their equipment to listen to your music. Audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment.“
Alan Parsons
I dunno if that’s actually an Alan Parsons quote but up vote for any mention of his name. Does sound like something he’d say.
Audiophiles don’t listen to music, they listen to their headphones
My ears.
No just joking, YouTube music mostly. It’s convenient, available everywhere, has a large catalogue, and good enough quality for me.
With all respect you’re not the definition of an audiophile at all. If anything you’re kind of the opposite
Not everyone can discern the difference between a 96KHz FLAC and 256kbps AAC. I can’t. But I still can (barely) tell the difference between 256kbps AAC, and 96kbps AAC.
But I can tell if a song was well-engineered or a mess.
I believe those who can’t discern the difference between bitrates (especially on high bitrates), but have the appreciation for good music, good mixing, and good mastering, can still be considered audiophile.
As I get older and the abuse I put my ears through starts showing up, I completely agree. After upgrading my music library to FLAC from VBR mp3s, I stopped having the, “Oh! There’s a subtle instrument going on in this part of the song!” moments.
It doesn’t stop me from trying to listen to the highest quality music formats that I can get my hands on, but I 100% know if I think there’s a difference to my mid-40s ears, it’s probably a placebo.
That’s not the comparison at hand, we’re talking YouTube audio compression vs any actual music track.
Especially when your browser or application requests a high quality bitrate, youtube compression is opus 128.
A person could make the argument that it’s not lossless so it’s not worth listening to, but opus is extremely high quality especially at that bitrate.
If you wanna try it for yourself, take a flac or whatever, upload it to yt, then use something like yt-dlp -x that defaults to the highest quality to redownload just the audio stream.
YouTube Music Premium offers AAC 256kbps as the highest quality.
Format ID 141: https://gist.github.com/AgentOak/34d47c65b1d28829bb17c24c04a0096f
Opus 128 is only for the audio of YouTube videos. Not YouTube Music.
and according to that same link it’s 160, not 128 (format id 251!). someone else pointed that out itt.
one of my downloads had an average bitrate of ~140 when queried with mediainfo, so i believe em.
I don’t have the premium account, what’s aac256 comparable to?
AAC 256 should be at least on par with MP3 320 CBR, might also be on par with ogg vorbis at the same bitrate
Yes. As a lifelong musician (live & recording), you’d think I’d be more fussy about audio quality…
But I’m just not. Just like the 4k vs 2k “debate”… It’s all about CONTENT.
Mostly? I have uncompressed FLAC encoded music on my Plex server, and I listen to that streaming through over ear (Bose NC-700) headphones on a computer, or on our home theater system (Monitor UK, 2 stand speakers, 2 rear wall speakers, 1 subwoofer) with an Onkyo receiver.
I also listen to Tidal hifi a bunch and electronica on youtube because some of the Boiler Room and other club mixes are pretty dope :)
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Clean your ear wax.
How do you do it?
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I’ve got a special speaker assembly that I shove up my ass*. The bass response is particularly pleasing.
- this isn’t true.
FLACs through PlexAmp, either to nice headphones ($500 range) or two channel stereo into some decent speakers with a decent subwoofer. I’d like to upgrade to “full range” speakers one day and save the subwoofer for movies.
PlexAmp does FLAC when connected to Wi-Fi but I have it set to transcode if I’m using mobile data.
At home it gets played through Chromecast Audios (R.I.P) which keeps it all digital until it hits my receiver.
At home: Spotify through Amazon Fire TV through Klipsch The Fives.
On the move: Spotify through Jabra Elite 4 Active.
In the bathroom: Spotify through UE Boom.
I really want to ditch Spotify, but in the meantime…
Well, TIDAL just got some price cuts, and their library is pretty comparable. Just in case you didn’t know.
Just read that today! Thank you.
Same, but I want to export my playlists and liked songs from Spotify. Going through that manually atm seems like too much of a hassle.
If you plan to move to another service, there exists a number of tools to aid in moving playlists between streamers. It is really easy, once you find a good one.
Helped me break the feeling of being locked in due to have 100s of playlists.
Tried one service but didn’t work with some Spotify lists, like the yearly ones. Any good recommendation that might include these as well?
Qobuz for me.
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At Home:
- FLACs via mpd with a topping headphone amp and Audeze LCD2C headphones
- Vinyl using an Audio Technica LP120, a Denon AV receiver and cheap wharfedale bookshelf speakers and a Klipsch subwoofer. That Setup isn’t really audiophile tbh, especially because the room sounds terrible.
- Streaming via Qobuz on both systems
On the go:
- Everything encoded as Opus 128 kbit/s to fit on my phone. Played over Lypertek Tevy true wireless IEMs. Not really audiophile but tbh when I’m not at home I care much more about convenience as long as the audio quality is good enough.
- also Qobuz, but at MP3 320 quality to save bandwidth
I wrote my own scripts to tag the music and encode it to FLAC and Opus and use syncthing to copy the files to my phone. So whenever I add an album to the library it will be available every where I want in the specified format without any manual copying involved. It’s a little janky but has worked surprisingly well for years.
At home: FLACs ripped from CDs (prefer to buy albums I enjoy instead of Spotifying them) -> KORG DS-DAC 100 -> TEAC AX-501 -> Elac Carina BS243.4
On the go: The same FLACs on Pixel 6 Pro -> B&O Beoplay HX
Spotify -> MOTU M2 -> HiFiMan Ananda non-stealth
“High resolution” audio is completely useless for listening (16 bit 44.1 kHz is the best it gets) and there is little value in lossless encodes for listening purposes too, so I don’t get the point of all those “Hifi” streaming services.
If you own lossless encodes, I guess it doesn’t hurt to use them even for listening as storage is cheap these days.Speaking of which, I’d like to switch to purchasing my music though because Spotify will certainly continue on its path towards full enshittification. I want to be in a position where I own all my favourite music before Spotify will be infected with ads on premium plans. Oh and artists are somewhat more likely to be paid a little for their work that way (I hope…)
I plan to use the free YT music for discovery at that point.Completely full of ads already, I routinely get promoted podcasts and gig ticket and merch notifications despite them being turned off.
I started using Spotify lite on my phone. And thankfully, there’s plenty of alternative clients on desktop (such as ncspot). No crap UI elements, just playlists.
I just use YouTube music revanced
