Agreed. They're a great jack-of-all-trades and are easily mended/upgraded.

I've been using my pair regularly for 15 years and they're still going strong.

Most people can't hear a difference between Spotify Premium and Qobuz and Tidal in a blind test, but who knows ... maybe you are in the 0.01% who can?

I did some extenstive testing recently that you might find helpful. You can download the test samples and see if you can personally hear a difference or not.

This is pretty accurate.

The only exception I ever found were the PX-100, which have since been discontinued, sadly. Those things were kickass for the price.

To quote yourself:

>It’s hard to imagine having an opinion this wrong

I pretty much assumed the speaker world would work the same way - that better engineered drivers have more impact on resolution, imaging, etc. than the source.

Fair point.

I'm a headphone guy, so was thinking about it more from that point of view.

Journey by Austin Wintory.

I have no idea why the Source > Speakers/Headphones still philosophy still exists.

It seems to me like a remnant of the days when subjectivism ruled the roost and no one actually bothered to do even basic A-B testing to see if spending $1,000 on an amp actually made much of a difference.

For science, I just downloaded mp3 versions of the Ltd. Edition Original Master and the 2019 Remaster and ran them through Foobar with the DR analyzer plugin.

Here are the results, which are almost perfectly identical (only 1 track has a slightly different DR score when compared to the database). So the readings in the database do seem to be accurate.

-/+2DR isn't going to make a huge audible difference. Ultimately, whether or not you hear a difference and prefer one master over the other in this case presumably has little to do with dynamic range compression but rather some variance in the mixing/mastering process that was applied to the remaster.

Where the loudness database does come in handy is in situations where one master has signifcantly better DR than the other, which most of the time is a strong indication of which will sound better.

Well for starters, both those masters look pretty similar. I wouldn't expect there to be much audible difference when it comes to DR, at least. There might be other factors that make you enjoy the remaster over the original.

>to my ears the remaster sounds better (which is what one would expect of a remaster)

Not really - the vast majority of remasters, for pop, rock,and electronia albums anyway, sound worse than the originals, since they are usually louder and more dynamically compressed to meet modern industry standards.

The original statement was so garbled that I didn't think they were actually talking about the quality of the mixing/mastering.

But if they were, then yes - that would be valid.

Unreliable how?

I've never had any issues with it.

>However, people around the internet told me that these headphones are so revealing that they require audio files that were recorded with quality, and that if I simply bought one of these headphones and used it on spotify, it would actually sound worse.

Complete nonsense.

>do I need to find good quality recordings on CDs of my favorite artists so that the HD650 can sound good like they are supposed to?

Better quality masters are highly desirable, not matter what headphones you use.

>Would buying one of these headphones just to listen to music on spotify be a waste of money?

Not at all.

In general, modern recordings are victims of the "loudness wars". Here's a good resource to find which masters are generally preferable - the higher the score, the better.

That's true, but that's not what you said before.

Your previous comment said

>and doesn't accurately reflect what the user listens to

Implying that a lack of familiarity with the tracks being tested might have a significant effect.

FWIW though, I would agree that the best way to ABX is to do your own conversion from lossless to lossy locally and use an offline ABX tool.

The difference you are noticing is almost certainly due to a combination of differences in your audio chain, volume disparities, along with a smattering of expectation bias.

If you really want to see if the flac files you downloaded sound better than lossy:

• Install Foobar2000 and the ABX plugin
• Add your flac files and then right click > convert them to >256kbps AAC/MP3
• Add the new lossy files to your playlist and select the flac version + lossy version together.
• Run those through the ABX comparision tool, do about 10-20 tries

I was also convinced that FLAC sounded "richer" before I actually tested it out, but afterwards my illusions were shattered.

To clarify, the link above isn't sponsored by Spotify - it's independent. They have ABX tests for Tidal as well.

Also, musical taste shouldn't have any bearing on sound quality comparisons.