Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Stereo So what are ya listening to tonight?

Unfortunately with Spotify, depending on the track, you are missing a boatload of information. If you have both a Tidal HiFi and Spotify Premium account, try playing the track "wish you were gay" by Billie Eilish from both sources. You'll be stunned...

Andrew, thanks for this. I tried Tidal and did not like the interface. I also did not find any difference in SQ with the material I listened to. This whole discussion has definitely piqued my interest in this topic.

I am really upset about this. I wish I didn't know about it. I've been listening to music and missing out. How can I ever recover those moments of low fidelity? How could I ever possibly know that Spotify is intentionally removing large frequency bands of content? How will I ever nurse my audiophilic synaptic pathways back to aural health? I curse you Spotify and all those who sprouted you from their foggy brains for leading me to believe that all frequency bands were preserved in your poo poo product.

I do >95% of my listening on the Actives via Qobuz. I use an old Squeezebox which has a plugin for it. No proprietary formats to deal with. Everything comes down in flac and I can see on the server the bitrate I’m getting which is nice. WiFi does struggle when the quality gets over 6000kbps but most is 1.5k to 3k at this stage.

For reference I believe standard cd quality is:
44.1 kHz * 16 bits * 2 channels = 1411.2 kbps

Qobuz isn't available in my country.

You know what? I'm taking a FUKITOL pill, selling all my gear and going back to AM/FM radio. At least there I know what I'm getting and no one can fool me.

Yep. Try Under the Milky way by The Church. Same thing. Air is gone. Or A little Respect by Erasure. Same. Easy to hear once you pin it down. Meh. Tidal is pricey for the user experience (playlists are poor and discovering new artists is pretty hard unless rap.)

If Spotify had Tidal quality I would happily pay more. They just nailed the experience.

Instead of Spoofify, how about if Andrew just runs a music streaming business out of his vinyl warehouse?

Boom!

It's my understanding that you can set the quality of audio streamed on a lot of these services.
The default setting on most is usually not the highest. Also encoding matters as much as bit rate ...

But I'm sure you guys already know all that ... and have cranked it

So I’m home alone and can play what ever I like without anyone’s complaints.
Tonight it is Menahem Pressler performing a whole lot of French music. Claude Debussy, Gabriel Faure and Maurice Revel to be specific. This is on the Deutsche Grammophon label.
Very nice indeed, as if he is right there in front of me.
Cheers
Jeff