| I know 100% that you're wrong, but I don't blame you for making that statement. The problem with "can't hear the difference" statements is that they're highly dependent on the system you're listening to. The vast majority of systems are not resolving to a degree that there is an audible difference between AAC or a lossless format. On my system, there is a profound difference between FLAC (at any bitrate) and higher rate DSD. Is DSD magically better? Not necessarily, but in my case my DAC bypasses its internal filtering for DSD playback, which means I can move the interpolation filter over to my CPU, which, running at 4GHz, is better at it than a (SOTA) DAC chip running at a few MHz. It's a complicated topic, and the only people I personally discuss it with are professional audio engineers or serious hobbyists. No one else cares. On topic, TIDAL is great in the sense that it's not US-centric for billing (just take my money please) and streams lossless. It's like a CD store for ~$20 a month (the max they'll take from me). I'd gladly pay a lot more and given the economics of it I'm worried it will go out of business at some point. If you're interested in the topic you can check out the Roon community, "minimum vs linear phase interpolation filters", "DSD upsampling" or check out the work of Ted Smith (MIT / software guy turned DAC designer). |