I own the KEF LSX II speakers and I can hear a slight difference in sound clarity between Spotify and Tidal in acoustic songs like i.e. "landslide" by "Fleetwood Mac".
Note that Tidal is supported via "KEF Connect" or while Spotify is available through Chrome Streaming, not directly IIRC.
Is it worth the big price tag? Not sure tbh. I don't play music very loud and I don't listen all that much outside working hours where my attention is elsewhere.
> 24-bit helps in production pipelines for mixing, but for end user playback it's pointless.
If you have two versions of something, where one is better than the other and the resource cost is more or less the same it makes more sense to provide the better than the worse.
Maybe the end-user takes interest in mixing/production for which they then have the higher version allowing them to work with without the faff of having to obtain the better quality works. The end-user won't know the difference and the new apprentice has a copy that they can work with.
That's not a loss, that's a benefit even if pointless to the end user.
We have been doing double blind test in HydrogenAudio.org for a while, and it shows most people won't notice (at certain levels of encoding).
https://hydrogenaudio.org/index.php/board,40.0.html