8 ms·
I do not have very sensitive ears, but maybe an audio enthusiast can explain this to me: In the 80s and 90s some people were going crazy over HiFi, only the ab
by jansan 4y ago
I do not have very sensitive ears, but maybe an audio enthusiast can explain this to me:
In the 80s and 90s some people were going crazy over HiFi, only the absolute high end products were just good enough. I remmeber seeing stereo systems for 50,000$ and more. CDs were already seen as inferior to records quality-wise, and speakers had to be huge if possible.
Today Wifi speakers are all the rage. The music is downloaded (precompressed) and then sent over Wifi or Bluetooth with (sometimes very) limited bandwidth to a single speaker which has the size of a laptop.
How does the audio quality compare? Is it like day and night? Or do the new multi room systems play in the same league as the old system that were used by enthusiasts? I often have the feeling that overall sound quality does not matter anymore as long as the bass is strong enough, but as I said at the beginning, my ears are not very sensitive.
- jsmith99 4y agoThe signal is digital until it gets to the speaker so there is no loss of quality after the initial encoding, which might itself be lossless. Some systems (eg Sonos) can stream lossless audio or even 24 bit 192 khz, which is certainly overkill.
- malermeister 4y agoWith some wireless systems (Bluetooth comes to mind), there's a lossy reencoding between playback device and speaker too!
- AshamedCaptain 4y agoLossy, but at >300kbps.... this is not going to be the part that introduces most artifacts.
- chrisseaton 4y ago> The signal is digital until it gets to the speaker so there is no loss of quality after the initial encoding, which might itself be lossless. This ain’t true - for example Bluetooth is lossy compression. ‘Digital’ doesn’t mean lossless from the source.
- CyberDildonics 4y agoYou are conflating compression and verbatim copying which are two different things and obviously not what they're talking about.
- chrisseaton 4y agoWhat they said: > The signal is digital until it gets to the speaker so there is no loss of quality after the initial encoding isn't true - the original encoding is decoded... and re-encoded, losslessly, by the Bluetooth protocol.
- djmips 4y agoWho said they were talking about Bluetooth. It sounds like they were talking about a proprietary system like Sonos Wifi.
- chrisseaton 4y ago> Who said they were talking about Bluetooth. Literally says ‘Bluetooth’ in the original comment.
- djmips 4y agoOriginal comment. "and then sent over Wifi or Bluetooth" the information about lossless was informative.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y agoIn a choice between convenience and quality, convenience wins almost every time.
- zeroflow 4y agoThose HiFi people are still there. And the products evolved with time. My guess: >90% of music consumers don't care about quality as long as it's good enough. What they care is ease of use. Why should they have a complicated setup and try getting their records in lossless FLAC when they can just go onto Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube and press play. I've seen lot's of people that don't even care that their audio has the intro parts when playing from youtube. So why should they care for HiFi.
- lloeki 4y ago> try getting their records in lossless FLAC when they can just go onto Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube Apple Music has lossless now.
- Bakary 4y agoIn some ways, audiophiles are the mirror image of this on the other end of the spectrum. Detectable improvements in sound do not matter and ABX testing is never mentioned in polite company. Why should they have a straightforward setup when they can purchase ever more arcane products and services to distance themselves from plebeians?
- cainxinth 4y agoYou can take a blind test and see for yourself if you can detect lossless audio from compressed: http://abx.digitalfeed.net http://abx.digitalfeed.net
- ahofmann 4y agoThis test is, of course, limited to the equipment with which you perform it. The most important equipment by far is your own ears. I was 16 when the audience was blindly played the same song (by Michael Jackson) from vinyl, CD and DVD on a 1.5 million dollar system. At that time I could immediately tell which medium was being played. Half the people in the room were wrong and it was clearly due to the age of the audience. Meanwhile, I would probably also no longer be able to tell the difference. But If your audio system sucks, you will also have a hard time to Tell the difference in this Test.
- cainxinth 4y agoI’m no spring chicken either and I don’t have a million dollar setup, but with a pair of $100 Shure SE215, I can just barely make out which are lossy (usually). But it’s not a big enough difference to concern me. I’m still plenty happy with a 320kps mp3.
- netr0ute 4y agoAudio quality has gotten a lot better over time as speaker and player technology improved, so now cheap mainstream stuff could be equal to high end back then.
- layer8 4y agoNot quite, the weakest link are the speakers (and room acoustics), and cheap speakers — which the large majority of “mainstream” speakers are — still suck today as they did in the 90s.
- eropple 4y agoA lot of mainstream speakers are pretty bad, but I tend to think that once you get above a couple watts the quality-for-money tatto ratio goes up quite a bit.
- netr0ute 4y ago> and room acoustics Interestingly, a study suggests that room acoustics don't negatively affect the sound of good speakers, and what that means is that for listening, acoustics don't matter as much as they do for recording.
- seb1204 4y agoThat is likely true for the transmission of the audio signal. Regarding the music itself I have heard complaints to the contrary. Loudness war/race and reduced dynamics are keywords I recall here. To blame was the way the audio was mixed before release. I'm not an audiophile though
- copperx 4y agoI can't answer all of your questions, but I today we have AirPlay, which streams uncompressed audio to the receiver. Before that, the only option was Bluetooth or proprietary network codecs.
- hurflmurfl 4y agoIsn't Airplay just another proprietary network codec though?
- adgjlsfhk1 4y agoSo to start, you should pretty much disregard anyone who thinks CD quality is worse than vinyl. CD quality is 16 bit, 44k samples per second, and despite some audiophile gear now that is 24 bit, 96k samples per second, ABX testing routinely fails to find a difference between them. As such, in terms of music quality and software quality, anything capable of delivering 16 bit, 44k samples should be considered "perfect" (i.e. FLAC/CDs). There is some evidence that in studio conditions, people can hear a difference between high bitrate lossy compression and CD quality, but realistically, even Vorbis at 128kbps or other formats at 256kbps or higher will provide a very good listening experience.
- grumpyprole 4y ago> even Vorbis at 128kbps or other formats at 256kbps or higher will provide a very good listening experience. Until it is resampled in the noisy OS mixer and/or lossy compressed again to be sent over Bluetooth. Very few ABX studies consider the effect of such modern "digital signal chains", especially transcoding. It's much better to start with FLAC.
- int_19h 4y agoAre there any studies demonstrating an observable difference in such a scenario?
- grumpyprole 4y agoMy point is that there are no studies demonstrating the absence of such issues. Anecdotally, my Bluetooth headphones certainly seem to sound better with a FLAC source.
- 01100011 4y agoCDs offer unquestionably better fidelity. But saying this without mentioning the loudness wars misses the main force behind vinyl's staying power. This is like making an argument for transistor guitar amps. They're better on paper, but tubes produce a type of distortion that is pleasing to many listeners.
- TacticalCoder 4y ago> CDs were already seen as inferior to records quality-wise, and speakers had to be huge if possible Doesn't sound very scientific to me. > How does the audio quality compare? Why compare with an old system from the 80s? I got to hear a friend's friend's modern audiophile setup. A dedicated room with Wilson Audio speakers (totally overpriced but amazing), high-end DAC, high-end amp... It was bliss. One of these $50K+ setup but bliss. This is nothing like a laptop, a soundbar or a Sonos. > Or do the new multi room systems play in the same league as the old system that were used by enthusiasts? I wouldn't be suprised they'd actually be better than these old systems. But they don't play in the same league as actual modern audiophile setups.
- nerbert 4y agoWhat would be a modern audiophile setup?
- TacticalCoder 4y ago> What would be a modern audiophile setup? What do you mean? What's the difference between an audiophile setup from the 80s GP was mentioning and one from today? Today you'd have a DAC, for a start. Maybe some DRC (Digital Room Correction software). Then amps have progressed tremendously. And so did speakers (newer materials). As for the setup I listened to: I'm no pro, I don't remember the details. I know the speakers were Wilson Audio but I don't remember the DAC nor the amp(s) brands: all I know is it was high-end stuff costing money I'm personally not willing to put in an audio setup. But it did sound very good.
- dylan604 4y ago>Doesn't sound very scientific to me. From my experience with them, you kind of just summed up the HiFi/audiophile core. I've spent waaay too much time with audio engineers, recording engineers, etc from edit bays to sound stages. Yes, there are now things that I can hear because they pointed it out to me, but until then, I was perfectly content with my head in the sand of not-knowing. However, while I agree there are certain things that can make a difference, the tendency for the absurd always seems to take hold.
- m-p-3 4y agoPersonally I use FLAC for archiving purposes, to preserve a copy of my physical CDs. They're available in my home Plex server, but they'll get converted to a lossy format if synced to save some storage space on that device.
- TacticalCoder 4y ago> Personally I use FLAC for archiving purposes, to preserve a copy of my physical CDs. Same, but at home I also play directly the FLAC files (laptop / DAC / amp / floorstanding loudspeakers). They're not that much bigger than 320 kbps mp3 files. I convert to lossy for my car, which takes mp3 files but not FLAC. I used to collect mp3s back in the Napster days. My HDD was maybe 40 GB back then (?), maybe not even that. Nowadays FLAC files size aren't a concern. I think a screenshot of my screen takes more room than a song FLAC encoded.
- dsr_ 4y agoThe cost for high quality plummeted, especially in audio storage, playback, and amplification. That was 1980-2010. The technical advances were not particularly big in microphones, but very big in analog-digital conversion, digital storage, digital editing, and digital-to-analog conversion. Amplification was rejuvenated by switching power supplies and class D amplifiers starting in 1996. The availability of high quality measurement techniques vastly improved the state of the art in speakers since 2000 or so. Meanwhile, mass-market audio has gotten better but not consistently. The speakers are usually the limiting factor for quality: you can have at most any two of small speakers, deep bass, or volume for a given power budget. Lots of consumer systems go for small speakers and don't have either deep bass or high volume. Does sound quality matter? That's an individual choice. It's available to you at a much lower cost than ever before in history.
- rsynnott 4y ago> I remmeber seeing stereo systems for 50,000$ and more. These absolutely still exist. What's changed, to an extent, is that they're a bit less fashionable; whereas in the 80s any self-respecting rich person needed a hifi that cost as much as a small house, today, this is largely the preserve of (rich) enthusiasts. The vast majority of people would have had relatively low cost stereo systems which were, by and large, far worse than their modern contemporaries, tho.
- wwarner 4y agoI admit I’m basically in this category. But I recently saw Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra and was totally blown away, mostly by the writing, musicianship, creativity and courage, but also because of the best audio quality I’ve ever experienced, and it has me questioning my assumptions.
- leokennis 4y agoI have to say, just as a casual observation, that for the same money I can get a lot better sound now in 2022 than I could in 2002. Most low to midrange headphones (€50-€100) sound very acceptable and even the lower range Bluetooth speakers (€50) sound decidedly not terrible. In 2002 this money would buy headphones with no bass, shrill highs and muddy mids. Just compare the original earbuds included with the iPod to the wired EarPods that Apple sells now. Or compare the AirPods Pro ($249) to what the same amount (inflation adjusted) could get you 20 years ago. Of course there’s still plenty of space on the high end, and still the higher you go the more you need to spend to achieve 1% better sound.
- karamanolev 4y agoThe main appeal of lossless, as I see it, is freedom - to reencode, transmit, store, transform audio (music) as you please, without any worry of loss. I'm not stuck with FLAC - I can use any fancy, new or old format and get the same music. I can create lossy MP3s, OGGs or anything else at a variety of bitrates appropriate for the case. Once you do lossless -> lossy, you're "stuck", unless you accept reencoding artifacts and those do add up to eventually be bad. I'm an audio enthusiast, have quality (but not excessive, triple digit prices) DACs, amps and everything else. I can't ABX 256kbps+ MP3s from lossless, but the above stands.