Asklemmy

43962 readers

1475 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

157

Audiophiles of Fedi, how do you like to listen to your music? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

128 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Not everyone can discern the difference between a 96KHz FLAC and 256kbps AAC. I can't. But I still can (barely) tell the difference between 256kbps AAC, and 96kbps AAC.

But I can tell if a song was well-engineered or a mess.

I believe those who can't discern the difference between bitrates (especially on high bitrates), but have the appreciation for good music, good mixing, and good mastering, can still be considered audiophile.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

That's not the comparison at hand, we're talking YouTube audio compression vs any actual music track.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Especially when your browser or application requests a high quality bitrate, youtube compression is opus 128.

A person could make the argument that it’s not lossless so it’s not worth listening to, but opus is extremely high quality especially at that bitrate.

If you wanna try it for yourself, take a flac or whatever, upload it to yt, then use something like yt-dlp -x that defaults to the highest quality to redownload just the audio stream.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

YouTube Music Premium offers AAC 256kbps as the highest quality.

Format ID 141: https://gist.github.com/AgentOak/34d47c65b1d28829bb17c24c04a0096f

Opus 128 is only for the audio of YouTube videos. Not YouTube Music.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago (1 children)

and according to that same link it's 160, not 128 (format id 251!). someone else pointed that out itt.

one of my downloads had an average bitrate of ~140 when queried with mediainfo, so i believe em.

I don't have the premium account, what's aac256 comparable to?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

AAC 256 should be at least on par with MP3 320 CBR, might also be on par with ogg vorbis at the same bitrate

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

As I get older and the abuse I put my ears through starts showing up, I completely agree. After upgrading my music library to FLAC from VBR mp3s, I stopped having the, "Oh! There's a subtle instrument going on in this part of the song!" moments.

It doesn't stop me from trying to listen to the highest quality music formats that I can get my hands on, but I 100% know if I think there's a difference to my mid-40s ears, it's probably a placebo.