Music lovers have been duped into paying $120 a year for lesser quality music

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Jone2three45

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N*E*R*D said:
My plan is to get my setup with a nice turntable, cd player, and AV receiver with streaming capabilities. Streaming has it's place but it needs to be said that in terms of quality it's definitely a step backward.
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You going vintage or modern?
 
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Jone2three45

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N*E*R*D said:
Where did you get it from?

Ebay and Discogs prices are ridiculous
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Local second hand store. I was looking for it for over a year too, didn’t want to pay online prices for it.

EDIT:

I think about 3-4 years ago on here I told people to buy their favorite cd’s second hand right now before it gets too late and out of control. The retro video game, vintage electronic, and music scene is all messed up now and prices are ridiculously high.

Come to think about it a few months ago I went to go look for The Click Game Related album on eBay, prices were close to $60 too.

Buy second hand locally if you can.
 
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2CT

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they came up with streaming to basically get people back to paying for music after the download era, sound quality was never really a huge factor cause a lot of these projects aren’t mixed and mastered right to begin with :manny:

the recent re-release of LiveLoveAsap is a great example, when that dropped it was a free mixtape but now they got people paying for it through their respective streaming service so they can profit off it when it was once free

as far as the topic at hand there’s a lot that goes into what quality you’re gonna get when you listen….your ears, the device, the final mixdown and master, the sound system, the file type, whether it’s a wired or wireless connection and etc. all play a part in the quality
 
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Harry B

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Bros spend 120 bucks on drinks for one night but stay arguing about paying 125 bucks for all the music in the world one click away for 365 nights in a row 24/7 :mjgrin:

Broke boys should stick to illegal downloads and stop worrying about people who don’t worry about 10 bucks. People can do both.

You can listen to cds or vinyl at home and stream in the gym, while taking a shyt at work or wherever. But if that’s a financial squeeze, you have bigger problems.
 
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JMD

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I prefer Vinyl now over CDs. I like its sound

streaming has its perks too but I never got into renting music, I'm more of a collector
 
Long Live The Kane

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ball15life said:
OP is on to something...

CD's definitely sound better than streaming but the ease of use is what gets a lot of people. I do miss having a CD player in my car.

The only thing that comes close is using flash drives in the car but that takes some time to setup
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:ohhh: Never really thought about that...do high quality files played from a flash drive sound better than streaming and like CD's instead? This would be mainly for the whip...I haven't had a CD player in the car for close to 5 or 6 years I think, but I could throw a bunch of shyt on a drive and it’s way easier than burning CDs
 
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Long Live The Kane said:
:ohhh: Never really thought about that...do high quality files played from a flash drive sound better than streaming and like CD's instead? This would be mainly for the whip...I haven't had a CD player in the car for close to 5 or 6 years I think, but I could throw a bunch of shyt on a drive and it’s way easier than burning CDs
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I've done an amateur test in my old car by streaming songs off Graduation and Food and Liquor since I had the CDs and albums on my flash drive for whatever reason.

If I had to rank quality it would go
1. CD
2. Flash drive (didn't use FLAC files)
3. Streaming

CD and Flash were way above streaming...it was to the point you could hear random instruments and stuff in the beats that streaming didn't pick up.

Need to do the test in my new car again with Streaming vs Flash drives
 
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Trace

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Renegade47 said:
streaming services compress the audio.

whenever i want to hear numbers on the boards by pusha i put the CD in. it dont bang right on streaming.
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It's normalization of the volume rather than compression. Normalization tries to level the output to a certain level so one song doesn't peak above the rest and attempts to keep some consistency of loudness from track to track. It gets annoying after a while tho.
Jone2three45 said:
AIFF, FLAC, ALAC is a no go for me.

AIFF is still a compressed file format and it doesn’t sound better than WAV to me.

FLAC and ALAC requires a device that’s capable of unzipping the file in real time during playback, that requires resources and it doesn’t sound better than WAV to me.

I don’t look twice at AAC and MP3.

WAV will always be the superior file format to me.

Unless you have a nice external dac and amp connected to a device with enough resources capable of handling Hi-Res playback then I wouldn’t look twice at it.

CD’s are one of the superior mediums compared to streaming, and sounds 10x better than it does in it’s current state.

Not only do you have CD playback, but you own the CD and can rip the files into any format you’d like. CD’s are looked down on today, but there is no better sounding medium that has ease of play, and that you could backup for archival purposes.

Vinyl is where it’s at, but just like CD and Hi-Res playback you need nice equipment to take advantage of it.

As someone stated earlier most vinyl modern presses are digital and it’s source come from a CD rip.

There are companies who take pride in what they do and make new presses from the original recording. So they are out there but you have to know how to look for them.

This conversation reminds me how old heads hated when DVD’s and Component came out and thought that VHS Tapes and S-Video we’re still a better format and produced a better image. It may be some truth in that, who knows.

Nice thread!
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AIFF and WAV are uncompressed formats of raw audio, provide uncompromised quality and take up a huge amount of unnecessary space. These are used in the studio for recording, where uncompressed and raw audio are needed to work with processing. They sound no different from Lossless files and if you're not editing or working with them there's no need to have that.

Formats like FLAC and ALAC are lossless formats, meaning they're compressing much of that unneeded space not needed during playback losslessly, meaning the sound of the original recording is preserved on all levels. It's like a zip file for uncompressed audio. Most devices today that are capable of FLAC playback should be more than enough to process those files. Space is usually the concern when using anything that's not lossy audio.

Hi-Res audio for the most part is marketing hype and taking advantage of what people can't see and isn't common knowledge. There's really no need for a hires player today or external DAC with today's phone technology, the average flagship phone today is more than capable. If you're trying to use difficult to drive headphones like HD650 and it has an amp built in, that's really the only place you'd benefit.

Even with today's mp3/AAC/vorbis/opus algorithms you're getting transparent music from the source at 224kbps (V0) and AAC256. Anything above that or lossless 44.1or 48/16 bit has no benefit to the listener, and is often used as a way to sell people the same shyt again and again.

They'd used to put different (better sounding) masters of the same album on super audio cd's, DVDs, and most recently the hi res attempt. (Most the time today it's the same exact shyt as the CD or what's in steaming services) Apple has been doing it too for years with that mastered for itunes bullshyt which is now apple masters.

As for steaming, over Bluetooth and wireless you're still not able to get a full transparent and lossless signal, you need wired. That said the loss is very minimal on services, it's the normalization most people are noticing.

I wouldn't be surprised they're dumbing down the lower tier versions either but for the most part streaming is very close for what we have today.
 
Renegade47

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Trace said:
It's normalization of the volume rather than compression. Normalization tries to level the output to a certain level so one song doesn't peak above the rest and attempts to keep some consistency of loudness from track to track. It gets annoying after a while tho.

AIFF and WAV are uncompressed formats of raw audio, provide uncompromised quality and take up a huge amount of unnecessary space. These are used in the studio for recording, where uncompressed and raw audio are needed to work with processing. They sound no different from Lossless files and if you're not editing or working with them there's no need to have that.

Formats like FLAC and ALAC are lossless formats, meaning they're compressing much of that unneeded space not needed during playback losslessly, meaning the sound of the original recording is preserved on all levels. It's like a zip file for uncompressed audio. Most devices today that are capable of FLAC playback should be more than enough to process those files. Space is usually the concern when using anything that's not lossy audio.

Hi-Res audio for the most part is marketing hype and taking advantage of what people can't see and isn't common knowledge. There's really no need for a hires player today or external DAC with today's phone technology, the average flagship phone today is more than capable. If you're trying to use difficult to drive headphones like HD650 and it has an amp built in, that's really the only place you'd benefit.

Even with today's mp3/AAC/vorbis/opus algorithms you're getting transparent music from the source at 224kbps (V0) and AAC256. Anything above that or lossless 44.1or 48/16 bit has no benefit to the listener, and is often used as a way to sell people the same shyt again and again.

They'd used to put different (better sounding) masters of the same album on super audio cd's, DVDs, and most recently the hi res attempt. (Most the time today it's the same exact shyt as the CD or what's in steaming services) Apple has been doing it too for years with that mastered for itunes bullshyt which is now apple masters.

As for steaming, over Bluetooth and wireless you're still not able to get a full transparent and lossless signal, you need wired. That said the loss is very minimal on services, it's the normalization most people are noticing.

I wouldn't be surprised they're dumbing down the lower tier versions either but for the most part streaming is very close for what we have today.
Click to expand...
so……compression.


and its also compression to lower the size of the file too.
 
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Trace

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Renegade47 said:
so……compression.


and its also compression to lower the size of the file too.
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Close but it's not the same thing.

The other compression related to lossy codecs is file compression, the other is a signal process.
 
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