YES. Probably why I can tell the difference better on cans with more detail (better, more resolving treble).
Higher-res Qobuz streams sound more airy and less congested to me. Less of the “listening through a paper towel roll” effect.
Your mileage may vary … 
Thanks for that ! My thoughts as well.
There’s some indie stuff where the fact that it sounds like it was recorded on a tape deck in someone’s bedroom is part of the charm, like they’re your friend down the street or lover or something singing about their innermost feelings.
You mean stuff like this:
Daniel Johnston was famous for refusing a major record deal because he’d be on the same label as Metallica – he feared they were satanic and would hurt him.
Johnston is probably the best example of this kind of thing, yes! King of lo-fi.
@ericrosenfield and @generic - Some other good ones in that category -
Ariel Pink’s The Doldrums, especially the track “For Kate I Wait”, (recorded in a bathtub, I believe)
and Dum Dum Girls’ first album with “It Only Takes One Night”.
And Daniel Johnston’s “True Love Will Find You in the End” shows you don’t need decent production, or to sing in key, to make something great that can move people.
I tend to agree with this, but I still pay a few extra dollars for Qobuz simply on principle. There’s just no reason at this point in time that music streaming services can’t give us high resolution music - I prefer to patronize the service(s) that do. Just like in a high-fi chain every 1% performance increase helps - those 1% improvements eventually add up to something noticeably better. And as long as the public is content to settle for 320kbps streaming there’s little motivation for producers to start battling for who can produce the highest resolution music instead of just the loudest.
p.s. sorry - I didn’t mean to take the conversation so far off topic, but I appreciate the spirited discussion!
And this is exactly why I think you’ll NEVER see Spotify offer a high-res tier, or at least the reason why a feature that was promised by the end of 2021 has been slow-rolled into at least 2023, if ever.
Spotify panicked when it was caught with its pants down by the announcement that Apple Music was streaming all its catalog at CD quality. It quickly reacted by announcing plans to launch a high-res tier.
That’s never happened because Spotify either wasn’t close to being ready to unleash its entire catalog at CD quality or because it learned the VAST majority of its customers could care less about high-res files and is perfectly content with 320 kbps or lower. There could be some of the former, but I guess the latter is main reason we’ll probably never see a Spotify high-res tier.
People like us are not normal music listeners; we’re niche outliers. Spotify is doing just fine without catering to us, so why spend a LOT of money on a feature that maybe 5 percent of the customer base will adopt and appreciate?
I think Spotify is perfectly content to let Qobuz, Tidal, Deezer and Apple fight over the sliver of people like us who want and appreciate high-res music. That’s not your average Beats, AirPods, Raycon or Bluetooth portable speaker user, which comprises the VAST majority of the global portable audio market.
Sorry for the threadjack.
I think you’re dead on with this. I’d be curious to know what percentage of Spotify users actually sit down with mid to high tier headphones and listen to music without distraction. I bet the majority listen while on-the-go or as background noise while taking part in other activities rather than focused listening sessions; our community makes up a very small percentage of all music listeners.
The general public doesn’t know what they want until you tell them. Most people were fine with iTunes when 128kbps was the standard rate for music files. John Q Public didn’t “decide” they preferred 320kbps until Spotify gave it to them. Public sentiment won’t change until the providers do, and the providers won’t change unless the few of us who know better pressure them into it.
Even if the few of us who “know” exert pressure, it’s the mass whose voices are heard. This is rational. It’s also known as marketing. Spotify owns the vast middle. And, frankly, they do a very very good job at it. They’ve been challenged, and they haven’t yielded an iota. 320kbps is just fine for, as you point out, the settings & equipment that most people listen on. Marketers know better than to try to change human behavior.
And yet qobuz exists. And Apple hi-res. And Amazon lossless. And Spotify hi-res (someday?)
Let your money do the talking. It’s the only leverage we have.
Sure. I’m not saying we are meaningless. Niche products exist and will do well (high margin, low volume) serving this niche community. But unless there’s a massive shift in consumer behavior, don’t expect it to influence how the large players act.
I could see Apple’s Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos open the eyes of more average consumers and be a possible gateway drug to this hobby. They’ve picked up their game with the air pods pro and air pods pro max. This can also cause more producers to improve their quality and in turn cause streaming services to up their game (Spotify).
I personally don’t care about Spotify, as I’m a Qobuz/flac/Roon user but competition is good for the market.
Edit: The Focal Bathy is reaching some too. I think these type of products lead people to this rabbit hole lol.
All of this boils down to hardware bottlenecks and the potential of consumer versus audiophile systems. Back when I owned only consumer headphones (e.g., Sony and Bose), I literally preferred compressed files because they were more defined and cut through the fuzz of the cheap drivers. I’d hear more hiss and mush from 16/44.1 files.
The split is around the Sennheiser 600 family. One can hear air, the room, and scaling. With the Sennheiser 500 family, no. One hears binary notes that don’t scale at all. If you can’t afford a $300+ setup then you won’t be in the game.
There was. DOWNWARD! TWICE! People had LPs and went to cassettes. People had CDs and went to MP3s. They listen to music on $10 headsets. They listen through phone/tablet speakers. They listen in cars. They listen in subways. They listen when working out. They use Bluetooth for convenience. They’ve proven many times over that they don’t care.
The key word here is hobby. The mass market uses appliance audio devices to hear new tunes. The old Top 40 music radio stations would dump tons of fresh ‘content’ on the market with about a 90 day commercial life. It’d be forgotten before the song finished playing. They did this for generations, and marketed “Boy Bands” to fresh crops of teenage girls for 50+ years. This is the sad reality of us tarted up apes.
Yeah but don’t forget the amount of people who use AirPods, AirPods Max, and now better apple audio quality. Tech YouTubers pushing average consumer products are pushing better audio products, some better than others. I think you’ll see more and more get into the hobby. Maybe not this deep but more into the quality of audio. And that’s what the point was above, about streaming improving their quality.
Hi @Resolve, I had a question about your descriptions of the Aeon Noire and the Closed X. You wrote that the Closed X is the best tuned closed planar for your taste, but you have the Noire higher up in your ranking list. Is it the technical performance that puts the Noire above the Closed X? Or do you also prefer the Noire’s tonal balance to that of the Closed X? The reason I’m asking is because I just received and love the Aeon RT (Closed X) and am now wondering if the Noire is an upgrade or just a different flavor of ice cream all together. Thanks for your time.
“All phenomena are real in some sense, unreal in some sense, meaningless in some sense, real and meaningless in some sense, unreal and meaningless in some sense, and real and unreal and meaningless in some sense.” – Robert Anton Wilson 
Wilson is hilarious. I highly recommend his Illuminatus trilogy. I strongly suspect that Qanon read it and failed to realize it was tongue-in-cheek.
Wow, quoting RAW at me. Lurv. Didn’t mean to push the envelope of solipsism. Not what I expected Sunday night. I meant what I said in a fully mercantilist sense. But I’ll take the broader meaninglessness. Time to put on Killing An Arab by the Cure.
Yes. Purely the intangibles. Noire doesn’t sound as blunted for trailing ends of tones, better separation.
And the upgrade is marginal at best, but for me it mattered.