PONO - Where Music Lives

(neil young visited us once, was shown through the office whilst we were sat there coding. was quite surreal. said golden ears has, i notice, a pic of him and neil as his linked-in photo)

fancy s/w office visisted by NY is indeed a visual mish mash.

oh, and that story re record collection is just, ummmm, weird.
but hey, your boss had a cool hat to wear.

Tidal streams at CD quality and it sounds really good

Checking it out now (via a trial subscription) -- seems you need to pay $20/mo. for "HiFi" (CD) quality streaming?

That said, the regular ("High") quality Tidal stream does seem to sound slightly better, when played from the desktop app thru my (not great) headphones, than Spotify & YT Music sound. Tidal's audio comes through somewhat quieter than the others, I need to adjust the volume levels to compensate, but there seems to be a little more detail? Idk, maybe it's in my head

Spotify does some level adjusting unless you tell it in settings (advanced?) not to. Also have to manually set Spotify to give you its best quality, iirc

Ah - the best quality that Spotify will let me choose w/out a subscription is "High"... I'm sure "Very High" (Premium only) sounds better. But Tidal's "High" def. beats Spotify's "High" (I just did some 1:1 comparisons).

aside from farting around myself with various services and codecs, this site for live A/B testing is handy.. http://abx.digitalfeed.net

for me it was a total crapshoot for anything over 320kbps

I've now had an opportunity to A/B Spotify at "Very High" quality (by logging in to my wife's account) and Tidal at "High" quality... and I still swear Tidal still sounds. I'm not some Hoffman Forums type; just going by my ears, using R.E.M.'s Out of Time (25th Anniversary Edition) for the test.

*still swear Tidal sounds better

That Qobuz service is going exclusively hi-res, lowering subscription price: https://variety.com/2019/biz/news/qobuz-kicks-mp3s-to-curb-hi-res-audio-1203398479/

Would be interested to do the trial and see if its catalog is even remotely comparable to the major services (especially for new releases).

I decided to do the Qobuz trial, just for kicks. It does sound good -- significantly better than YT Music (my crappy-sounding default) -- but probably not worth the extra $5/mo. over Tidal or Spotify (at least when played over my cheap bluetooth headphones).

The bass in some of these streams is actually boosted a little too much for my taste...

Ooh - there's a switch in the settings to bump up the quality to "Hi-Res 24-Bit / up to 192 kHz" (for supported recordings). Damn, that really does sound good. (You can toggle between the four settings as you play a track, to compare on the fly.)

hold the phones.. Bluetooth? surely it's using LDAC then? I've never bothered with it, but I think any other sort of Bluetooth compression is going to severely limit this lossless experiment

I mean, I can definitely hear the difference between at least the top tier and the lower ones (unless someone with real tech knowledge insists that's not possible, and I'm falling prey to severe power-of-suggestion).

I mean yeah it’s impossible for Bluetooth to reproduce that, it doesn’t have the bandwidth to even do CD quality audio, let alone 24 bit.

You probably can hear a difference though because I strongly suspect the services that offer 24bit audio EQ those streams differently to help you believe it does sound better.

Hmm... yeah, the bass doesn’t seem as jacked; highs & mids sound more clear. Maybe YouTube Music is just really crappily EQ’d(?)

MY PONONO