Have you ever done an actual double blind listening test? You'd be surprised. Even with good listening equipment it can be very challenging.
Have a go on the 128 kbps AAC test on this page and see how you do:
aleph
joined 1 year ago
Literally the only difference between 16 bit and 24 bit is that the latter has a lower noise floor, which is really only useful for sound production - It doesn't translate to any increase in meaningful detail or dynamic range when dealing with playback.
16-bit was chosen as the defacto standard for CDs and digital music precisely because it contains more than enough dynamic range for human hearing.
Any difference your gf hears is due to the placebo effect rather than any inherent difference in the actual audio.
But 24-bit audio is useless for playback. The difference is literally inaudible. In fact, the application of dynamic range compression during the mixing/mastering process has a far greater impact on perceptible audio quality than sample rate or bitrate does (the placebo effect notwithstanding).
If you care about audio quality, seek out album masters and music that is well-recorded and not dynamically crushed to oblivion. The bitrate isn't really all that important, in the greater scheme of things.
Sure, but even 300% of a tiny amount is still a tiny amount. People shouldn't be kidding themselves that Tidal pays artists well when the compensation is still significantly less than if you buy an artist's music directly.
The best approach is to use both - streaming for discovery and online stores for when you find an artists you really like and want to support them financially.
They still don't pay the artists all that much. No streaming services do.
If you genuinely want to support artists financially, you should buy their music outright through online stores like Bandcamp or Qobuz.
Problem is, Israel has made it pretty clear they don’t care if they lose US support (or don’t believe it can politically happen)
It's definitely the latter. Israel would very much care if they lost US support, as the drop in funding and military materiel would weaken their power in the region considerably.
Gotye. He made two great albums then faded into obscurity.
I have a flagship Galaxy device and there was nowhere near that many. As I mentioned before, the budget Samsung devices are much worse than the flagships when it comes to bloatware.
In any case, the subject at hand is not bloatware (which is undeniably bad - no argument from me) but ads. Not the same thing.
A pre-installed app is not an ad, though.
Plus pretty much of of them can easily be disabled.
Where'd you hear about flagship Samsung phones having ads?
As far as I know, the only Samsung models that feature ads tend to be the lower end series that get sold in markets like India.
Nah, NFTs were always about the grift first and the art second.
After all, all an NFT token is is a digital receipt which links to an image hosted somewhere off-chain, not the image itself. All the "art" does is help to persuade people that the tokens are actually worth something and hype up the price even further.
As a recovering audiophile, I can safely say the hobby is heavily based around FOMO (the nagging doubt that something, somewhere, in your audio chain is causing a loss of audio quality), and digital audio is no exception. Not only is 320kbps more than enough, even with $1000s worth of equipment, but with codecs more efficient than MP3 (especially Opus), even 128kbps can be good enough to sound identical to lossless.
If you have plenty of local storage then 16-bit FLAC is ideal, but if you are just streaming then you really don't need a lossless service except to keep the FOMO at bay.