Recent comments in /f/headphones

whisternefet t1_je2e5fi wrote

Reply to Monoprice canceled my m1570c order. I guess you guys bought them all up when they were $200 and they still let my order go through? by didnt_ask_dont-care

I'm part of the 19th cancellation crew - 11:30 AM PST. Got the cancellation form letter email yesterday. I've seen others say that they ordered on 3/14 also have their orders cancelled yesterday. It's a real bad look for a vendor to charge before shipping and take that long to issue a refund.

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Capital-Werewolf-167 t1_je2e3ir wrote

Reply to What music service do you guys use? by dpalma9

I can tell when a Tidal MQA comes on my car Hifi .( I attribute that to the remix remaster) that's with a cheap Boss car stereo and road noise. So don't say people can't hear the difference. You mean you can't hear. The difference between Spotify and Qobuz is quite apparent with even something like Truthears Crinacle Zero.

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ultra_prescriptivist t1_je2c4ra wrote

Reply to comment by dpalma9 in What music service do you guys use? by dpalma9

Again it comes down to there being a difference on paper but not to our ears. Human hearing has numerous blind spots that lossy codecs can use to cleverly remove audio data that is either 1) outside of the audible range to begin with, or 2) too quiet or drowned out by other sounds in the mix. As such, it doesn't really matter if you have very expensive gear or not, your ears will always be the bottleneck.

Expensive gear exists simply because it generally does make music sound better, regardless of whether it's lossless or lossy. What matters far more to our enjoyment of that music is how well it was recorded, mixed, and mastered. File formats and bitrates/samples rates etc, have nearly no impact past a certain point.

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dpalma9 OP t1_je2azlo wrote

Reply to comment by ultra_prescriptivist in What music service do you guys use? by dpalma9

Thanks for the answer. I'll check those links.

I understand what you say but, it that was so, how are there that many expensive headphones (and it's accesorios) aside the music? I guess you have to tell some difference, right? Even if there aren't "that much".

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ultra_prescriptivist t1_je2ab73 wrote

Reply to comment by dpalma9 in What music service do you guys use? by dpalma9

"On paper", sure, but to our ears? The vast majority of people, u/CertainlySomeGuy included (most likely), can't tell high bitrate lossy from lossless in a blind test.

It's relatively easy to set one up for yourself - check this out if you're interested and have ten minutes to spare.

Or, if you can't be bothered to select your own tracks, convert them etc., check out this online test instead.

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RB181 t1_je29f5r wrote

Reply to comment by CrelbowMannschaft in What music service do you guys use? by dpalma9

I wasn't aware that Spotify had some sort of "smart" normalization going on but my point still stands. Normalization can only reduce audio quality by reducing dynamic range, not enhance quality, so there's little reason to use it if you have a functioning volume control.

I could also go on a tangent about how using normalization at a low volume level (which is essentially the same as reducing the volume in the Spotify app) is worse than keeping Spotify volume at max and controlling the volume via the OS mixer or an analog knob, but that's beside the point.

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ultra_prescriptivist t1_je28wqt wrote

Reply to comment by RB181 in What music service do you guys use? by dpalma9

In most cases, normalization doesn't affect dynamic range at all; all it does is adjust the volume to a pre-defined level (measured in LUFS).

Spotify is different from other streaming services because Premium users can select different normalisation levels - quiet, normal, and loud.

The funny thing is that "Loud" here doesn't always mean that normalization turns the perceived volume up. If a track was mastered fairly loud already, enabling normalization and setting it to Loud may even drop the volume. You can see this on Daft Punk's Give Life Back to Music. Notice also how the shape of the waveform stays the same, since no dynamic range compression is being applied.

However, the one situation where the normalization setting does affect dynamic range is when we have a track with high dynamic range that was mastered relatively quietly and we set the normalization to Loud. The problem now is that the loud parts of the track might be pushed too high and cause clipping, so a limiter has to be applied to ensure that we don't get distortion. This applies to most classical music, such as this recording of Mahler's 5th Symphony.

Notice how the Normal setting looks the same as having normalization switched off but the Loud setting has compressed the track significantly, going from a DR (dynamic range) value of 12 to around 6.

For Spotify users who want to avoid any dynamic range compression, leaving normalization enabled and set to the Quiet or Normal settings is fine - they just need to be careful when having it set to Loud when listening to certain types of music.

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HabteG OP t1_je285u6 wrote

Reply to comment by emptypencil70 in Don't buy the Superlux HD 681(/Evo) if you want to use it for more than a year by HabteG

Soundstage. They felt super wide if you catch my drift. Also theyre very detailed. It's a lot of fun listening to/composing and producing music with em as they're well suited for all tasks.

And I could finally stop only wearing one earpiece at a time as I could hear shouting family members even with both on lmao

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