Understanding lossless, high-resolution, and spatial audio

09 June 2021


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  • s
  • sorin
  • MEQ
  • 09 Jun 2021

I'm using the Onkyo HF player right now with pioneer ch3t playing flac and 24bit wav, i don't care about bluetooth and online streaming. But some people do.

    That's a really informative article! I didn't really know much about audio compression, so it was really interesting to me.

      • L
      • Lacek
      • 35p
      • 09 Jun 2021

      wow, a really good post, congrat Prasad!

        • ?
        • Anonymous
        • JT5
        • 09 Jun 2021

        In the end, unless you have high quality/expensive wired eaphones/headphones, you do not take full advantage of the service.

          Lossless is enjoyable, unlike lossy, but only if you use hq hw and sw in every part of listening process - recording, transfer, device dac, amp and driver... just one is bad and your experience is worse. Shouldn't forget your ears, if you did never listened to the likes of LP, DSD or on dedicated HQ devices like Devialet, Sony and many others got with also wired lossless transmission, you won't understand what it is like. I use planar headphones with ldac but wire still gives more detail, you just need enough place and time to enjoy so you can relax more, whats not possible if your braing work hard to do that instead - si ilar to Sony's DSEE, but thats not the original amount of detail, though it improve godly.
          Finally, spatial audio is just plain old 3D but not in game and on 1 horizontal lvl. Just remember that it's also not perfect experience, though positioned in space, its not like in real life with ears - binaural, digital listening is still behind real experience.
          And again consideri g bluetooth 20hz-20khz cutout, its more like average and easily recognizable limit, for ex. frequencies below 20Hz can be heard by anybody with enough volume. Sad part about loseless is that once you hear and enjoy it, you won't want to go back to scrapped listening experience.
          Go to store and experience hi res, simple, fast way to understand what you are missing.

            • J
            • John Bonham
            • wYG
            • 09 Jun 2021

            YUKI93, 09 Jun 2021"This is why Apple also recommends using an external D... moreI concur!

              "This is why Apple also recommends using an external DAC when playing back the high-resolution files on Apple Music."

              Lol really, Apple? I don't need to do that from my LG V50. Even with my secondhand $20 Pioneer headphone, the difference is immediately real when I play WAV and FLAC files. I even once borrowed my friend's studio-grade Sony and Audio Technica headphone, and the difference is even greater than my cheap used headphone. Having said that, it was because of LG's built-in DAC that I had stopped embracing wireless Bluetooth audio altogether. I sold off all my old Bluetooth headphones and never look back.

              P.S I once tried Tidal under trial. Great sound compared to Spotify's MP3 format, but the library is far from big. I ended up not subscribing to Tidal because quite a lot of my favourite songs, especially under Electronic-related genres, is not on Tidal.

                So, is Tidal's hires audio worse than Apple's? Because Apple saves its hires tracks as lossless files, but Tidal saves its hires songs as lossy files.

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