That came in the news literally after I wrote my previous comment. FLAC is great of course, because it’s lossless.

If you google Tidal vs Spotify song count, though, you’ll find sources which say Tidal has more songs than Spotify. I’ve found everything I want on Tidal as well.

Lossy audio compression algorithms work based on psychoacoustic effects. The average human ear will not detect all the “parts” in a lossless signal - there are things you can drop from the signal because:

• Human ears are most sensitive around the frequency of human speech, but less at others
• If there is a loud signal, a much more silent one very close will be masked if it occurs within a couple of milliseconds around the loud one
• There are other more subtle aspects of the human ear you can use to detect signals we just won’t notice.

So in order to determine exactly which parts of an audio signal could be dropped because we don’t hear them anyway, they measured a couple of thousand people’s listening profiles.

And they used that “average human profile” to create their algorithm.

This, of course, has a consequence which most people, including you apparently, do not understand:

The better your personal “ear” matches the average psychoacoustic model used by lossy algorithms, the better the signal will sound to you.

In other words, older people, or people with certain deficiencies in their hearing capabilities, will need higher bitrates not to notice the difference. In the 90s, I used to be happy with 192 kbps CBR MP3. But now, being an old fuck, boy, can I hear the difference.

Ironically, I can detect the difference not because my ears are “trained” or “better”, I can detect it because my ears are worse than yours!

So the whole bottom line is this: While it may be true that you, personally, do not require lossless to enjoy music to the fullest, other people do. Claiming that lossless isn’t needed by 99.9% of the population is horseshit and only demonstrates that you have no clue about how lossy compression works in the first place.

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.

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. :)

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.

Crappy punk music should be listened to from vinyl anyway.

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.

ARTE is easily the best thing on German television that ever happened. Great documentaries, culture, music, just shitloads of great content if you’re not a brain dead sitcom-with-canned-laughter consumer.