Technology

Lossy audio compression algorithms work based on psychoacoustic effects. The average human ear will not detect all the "parts" in a lossless signal - there are things you can drop from the signal because:

• Human ears are most sensitive around the frequency of human speech, but less at others
• If there is a loud signal, a much more silent one very close will be masked if it occurs within a couple of milliseconds around the loud one
• There are other more subtle aspects of the human ear you can use to detect signals we just won't notice.

So in order to determine exactly which parts of an audio signal could be dropped because we don't hear them anyway, they measured a couple of thousand people's listening profiles.

And they used that "average human profile" to create their algorithm.

This, of course, has a consequence which most people, including you apparently, do not understand:

The better your personal "ear" matches the average psychoacoustic model used by lossy algorithms, the better the signal will sound to you.

In other words, older people, or people with certain deficiencies in their hearing capabilities, will need higher bitrates not to notice the difference. In the 90s, I used to be happy with 192 kbps CBR MP3. But now, being an old fuck, boy, can I hear the difference.

Ironically, I can detect the difference not because my ears are "trained" or "better", I can detect it because my ears are worse than yours!

So the whole bottom line is this: While it may be true that you, personally, do not require lossless to enjoy music to the fullest, other people do. Claiming that lossless isn't needed by 99.9% of the population is horseshit and only demonstrates that you have no clue about how lossy compression works in the first place.

You don't need a trained ear for lossless audio to be different for lossy audio.

Are you a musician? You can hear whats missing if you know what to listen for.

I agree that the vast majority of people will not be able to distinguish one from another, but the company is the biggest streaming service and they’re behind their competitors in this aspect. They also have been promising this for years and not delivering.

everyone listening to audio on a modern phone will be using bluetooth anyway. lossless is jist a money grab.

even my local flac files are indistinguishable from standard quality streamed media over bluetooth

I don't get it either. I'm pretty sure it's just marketing bullshit and many people are falling for it. Same with bluetooth headphones and codecs. I wouldn't be surprised if the difference between LDAC and AAC on an average bluetooth headset wouldn't even be scientifically measurable.

It's funny how many times people on Lemmy have accused Spotify of not paying artists fairly but for some reason there's a large amount of 'I pirate music and pay artists nothing' that goes on around here and no one says a thing

yeah golden ears are very rare. 320 kbps of any codec is fine for me.