![]() So before you get your wallet out for the promise of higher quality audio, why don’t you actually put your hearing to the test? Test your hearing Still, many golden-eared audiophiles will swear they can hear a difference without evidence. ![]() Simply believing that a certain upgrade or key specification will make your speakers or headphones sound better is often more likely to cause to an ‘improvement’ than any actual change. Our hearing is subject to a whole lot of placebo. Although at low bitrates the differences between lossy and lossless audio can be quite obvious, I’m willing to bet most people can’t tell apart a lossless file from a 256 kbps MP3 one - let alone a file compressed with the more modern Ogg codec that Spotify uses. Spotify Premium (the existing, $9.99 ad-free tier) already streams at a maximum of 320 kbps (256 kbps on the web) if you’ve enabled this in the app’s settings. After all, the vast majority of listeners do not have the hearing ability to tell the difference between lossless audio and music that is compressed at a high enough quality. It’s unsurprising, then, that most services turn to lossy compression. There are ways of compressing music losslessly, but they generally can’t reduce file size as much as a decent lossy compression. It’s true that most music streaming services compress audio in one way or another in order to minimize data usage, almost always leading to some lost information. At least, not in order to make your music sound better. Although it’s still not available as 2021 comes to a close, Spotify HiFi promises “CD-quality” audio and aims to steer audiophiles away from other lossless streaming competition like Tidal and Deezer - and more recently, Apple Music and Amazon Music too.īut even if you consider yourself an audiophile, you probably don’t need to pay extra for lossless music. different pads, modifications etc.).Earlier this year, Spotify announced a ‘HiFi’ upgrade tier for its streaming service that provides lossless audio, promising music free of compression artifacts. ![]() Any changes or modifications will be stated in the measurement entry itself (e.g. All headphones are measured stock unless otherwise stated. The measurements are performed with the assumption of a “perfect seal”. Placements that results in abnormal rolloff are scrapped and re-done until a proper seal is achieved.ħ. If you find issues with my measurements, it can be any of the following:ī) Broken/malfunctioning units (in a way that is not immediately obvious)ĭ) Measurement error (yes, I am human, I make mistakes sometimes)Ħ. ![]() Unit variation is a thing. I do not control what demo units the companies provide to me or to their distributors (where I usually do measurements). If not for the graphs, one can also take this database as a list of headphones I’ve tried and auditioned, and the graphs simply being proof of it.ĥ. 99% of the headphones I’ve measured, I have listened to as well. I get that certain people like to paint me as some sort of objectivehead figure where all I do is look at graphs and determine quality sorely off of said metrics. Measurements are meant to complement subjective impressions, not form the basis for them. For additional target curves, the Graph Comparison Tool has them available.Ĥ. All headphone measurements are compensated to the “IEF Neutral” target curve by default. Flat on the graph DOES NOT MEAN flat in real life. The fact that headphones bypass the head necessitates higher SPL in the 2-5k regions as compensation (see: Diffuse Field, Head Related Transfer Function, Harman Target).ģ.1. This means that measurements in this database are directly compatible with target curves like KEMAR Diffuse-Field and the Harman Target, both of which are derived from GRAS rigs.ģ. Measurements in this database are done on a GRAS 43AG-7 and so conform to the standards laid out in IEC60318-7. It’s not going to tell you if it’s good ice cream, but at least you have a way of finding out if it’s the flavour you want.Ģ. The FR is like the branding at the side of the tub telling you the flavour of the ice cream. A Frequency Response graph is not in any way an indication of good sound quality. Think of it as flavours, like in ice-cream.
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