| You are very unlikely to hear a difference like this on laptop speakers. Present-day Apple laptop speakers are great feats of engineering for what they are, but they use a bunch of trickery to create the illusion of bass and such. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_fundamental Even with decent headphones, the difference between these samples isn't trivial to spot, unless you have moderately trained ears. I'm not an audio professional but I have a great interest in this space. My first impression is that the the bass in the second sample stands out a bit more in the mix, perhaps thanks to higher dynamic range. The high range is muted and the mid range in the percussion and such may be more pronounced. That's not to say you're wrong about audiophiles. A lot of claims made by this subculture are nonsense and especially not applicable to situations where an everyday person seeks some improvement to their audio reproduction. For example, lossy audio codecs have a bad reputation among certain people, due to old technology. Mp3 is undoubtedly garbage, 90s tech. If I waste a bunch of time on blind tests, I can spot even a 320 kbps mp3 sample with my regular listening headphones. Lower bitrates are a lot more obvious to spot. However, this problem is gone for almost all people in most listening environments, mine included. This is thanks to the more modern lossy delivery codecs at decent bitrates, as employed by the the premium tiers of the big streaming services, which are Vorbis (Spotify) and AAC (Apple and most others) and Opus (Youtube Music in some circumstances). Archival and editing copies of audio should obviously be lossless. Generational loss over lossy media are as real with digital re-encodes as with analog tape. A regular person who wants to improve their listening experience can easily get decent headphones now. However, anyone who wants to invest in a better shared listening experience than a decent portable mono Bluetooth speaker can offer, should probably start by thinking through the the acoustics of the room they want to listen in. This doesn't have to be fancy, just having shelves with actual books on the walls in the direction looking towards a speaker system does a lot. Spending more than 200 USD on speakers in a room with blank walls is ridiculous, unless it's a log cabin. Those actually sound great. |