• ARNiM@lemmy.world
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    10 months ago

    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.

    • teawrecks@sopuli.xyz
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      10 months ago

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

      • bloodfart
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        10 months ago

        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.

          • bloodfart
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            10 months ago

            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?

            • ARNiM@lemmy.world
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              10 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

    • pezhore
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      10 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.