Then, with Tidal there is the MQA topic and that's the format Tidal uses for all hi-res streams (don't think I've seen any native hi-res FLAC there recently, everything is MQA). Only very very few people have such a sensitive hearing that can objectively differentiate that and prove that with a proper ABX test. For vast majority of people they cant hear difference if you take the 44.1/16 CD quality as a baseline and compare it with 44.1/24, 48/24, 96/24 and so on - basically anything lossless above 44.1/16. I mean some people don't hear it, some people just don't care and some people may need a bit of training or experience to focus on the right details and aspects of sound to be able to spot the difference. It's not that hard to hear the difference between 320 kbps and 44.1/16. The bitrate difference is there due to the content and variation on that 1000 kbps rip that simply can't be compressed as much as the 700 kbps rip in order to remain lossless. The 1000 kbps CD rip can be a shitty heavy metal recording with lots of going on, but has 1000 kbps bitrate and can still sound worse (because it's simply a bad recording/master) than the 700 kbps CD rip, that has maybe few instruments only, some vocals and lot of silence in the tracks, basically not much going on. I use compression level 5 by default for all my rips. There can be a CD rip with ~700 kbps bitrate and another CD rip with bitrate over 1000. I have CD rips in FLAC made on my own from my own CD collection. That's why looking at FLAC bitrate can be kind of misleading and does not say everything about the audio quality at the end. The result at the end should be always the same. Only with higher compression levels it puts more load on CPU when you create that FLAC and do the compression or when you actually playback that FLAC during decompression and decoding, which I think is done by CPU. FLAC is just a container (like those ZIP files in windows) and regardless of the compression level it's always lossless, so quality will be always the same. But another side note: The FLAC compression level has no impact on the sound quality. So if one doesn't have the right gear to be able to hear the differences, then going with Spotify's highest quality stream is probably good enough for most folks. But my setup is not much different than that of most streaming users, probably superior actually. I don't have headphones and dac's that might allow me to hear the difference however, just a Sonos sound system. I'm older, and I'm sure I've suffered some age-related hearing loss, but I'm unable to hear any difference between Spotify's 320 kbps ogg vorbis and a 16/44.1 HiFi stream from another service. Opus was intended as a replacement for Vorbis, just like Vorbis was for LAME mp3. The Vorbis codec is a great one in my opinion, much better than any of the other lossy codecs, except for maybe Opus. Note that the vorbis encode has no shelving at any frequency. If the scale on the flac SG extended higher, we could better visualize the shelf at around 22 kHz. This is a comparison of a 320 kbps vorbis from Spotify to a 16/44.1 flac from either Qobuz or Deezer. Here's an example of what I'm talking about: Other encoders tend to use a relatively crude, across-the-board cut-off of all the higher frequencies resulting in a shelf or straight line running horizontally across the entire spectrogram. Vorbis also uses a more selective process in determining which data to drop, so if you look at a spectrogram of a good Vorbis encode, you won't see any shelving like you will with other lossy encodes, or with a 16/44.1 flac encode for that matter. If you download a 16/44.1 flac from one of the streaming services, MediaInfo shows a bitrate of slightly over 700. At a 320 kbps bitrate, and I don't remember the exact equivalencies, this would be like having an encode in another format with a bitrate in excess of 400 kbps but probably less than 450-475. It's actually encoded with the Vorbis codec and is in an Ogg container. Just a slight technical point about Spotify's highest quality stream.
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