[bscphil]

It's sort of bonkers that we've quietly gotten to the point that codecs for music are getting compared at the 32 kbps level, for full stereo. Audiophiles used to constantly be making comparisons between codecs to see what's superior, but that whole field seems to have died when Opus became very difficult to ABX at 128 kbps. There hasn't been a HydrogenAudio multiformat test in nearly a decade [1], and that one was 96 kbps.

These days even YouTube videos get transcoded to 128 kbps Opus, which is astonishing. Provided that the source is high enough quality, you can listen to transparent audio on the lowest-tier streaming platform.

[1] https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Hydrogenaudio_Li...