Ask Lemmy

They hype is mostly marketing. Like you've noticed the highs do tend to suffer the most from compressed audio.

The only times it vary noticeable to the average person is when you're playing back on studio speakers in a treated space, or a large system such as a stage or theater. Other then that, unless you're paying attention on nice headphones, the difference will be negligible.

There is merit in wanting the lossless file so you can compress it properly/how you like.

For Tidal, I just looked at the site

Here's their tiers of sound quality.

Max

(Up to 24-bit, 192 kHz)

[...] best [...] sound quality [...] HiRes Free Lossless Audio Codec (HiRes FLAC). Best [...] on 5G or WiFi with a hardware connection.

High

(Up to 16-bit, 44.1 kHz)

[...] over 110M songs in studio quality with FLAC. As an open source format [...]

Low

(Up to 320 kbps)

[...] without worrying about data. Useful when you have a weak signal, are reaching your data cap, or are running out of download space.

So the low teir is actually compressed, 320kbps is a good number to see for a quality compression (assuming it started off as a quality lossless file). This will work great for headphones, phone speakers, anything Bluetooth etc)

The high teir that claims studio quality is bull-shit. Maybe 30 years ago, but 16-bit 41.1khz is just CD quality. It'll be perfectly fine on 99% of "nice" consumer devices ($100+ headphones, bookshelf speakers, stage speakers you hooked up in your garage, etc.)

The max teir at 24, 192khz is complete overkill. 192khz is really only usesfull in a studio, but not for listening - super oversimplification: the additional data "overhead" can help made the end product sound better at 48khz.

I could see a max teir at 24bit, 48khz being useful to someone with a home theater or commercial setting with a large system where quality actually matters. In those cases, the quality difference will be noticible between 16 and 24.

Honestly? It's mostly bullshit, you won't be able to notice much of a difference at all unless you're using very high-end headphones plus an amplifier at the very minimum. The reality is most (if not all) consumer grade audio devices can't reproduce the fine details in lossless files without some sort of audiophile setup and even then they're so discrete you usually need a trained ear to notice them, so basically most people are paying for a placebo while they'd be better served with lossy formats like good old mp3.

I don’t want to be elitist but I don’t understand how people don’t notice. Put on some regular headphones and it’ll become immediately obvious, or listen to someone stream music in low quality loud in their car. It tends to give me a headache pretty quick because it sounds like a high pitched reverberating tunnel more than it does music.

I know I’m some stranger on the internet and this probably just sounds like more hype but it honestly drives me crazy.