I hear the difference between my apple lossless files and my CD player.

There's quite a bit of new hi rez masters eg, the Joni Mitchell Seies 24/192 that sound pretty fabulous. Whether the accompanying new redbook CD box sets sound as good is an interesting question.

 

Right. I think it's actually the vinyl resurgence that is motivating reissues of old material. Steely Dan's new catalog for instance (but the UHQR's are all analog and stock $30 reissues digital 24 bit remasters?)

 

There can certainly be complicated differences of masterings, and definitely transcoding if you're listening to lossy compressed services like Spotify, especially for Apple -- here's Apple's guide for providers for Apple Digital Masters mastering: Apple Digital Masters 2.4.1 (Oasis)

The masterings tend not to be all that different from the other most recent commercially available digital masterings, but it does depend on the project and label and service.

Normalization is always, to my knowledge, a user selectable/defeatable feature. You can toggle it on or off. I'm currently a subscriber to Qobuz, Spotify and Deezer, and was once a Tidal subscriber and trialed Amazon. But I don't think you need to enable normalization on any of them.

I don't know about bandwidth throttling, IIRC I only ever encountered that with Amazon.

 

Well, the labels provide the files, so it's whatever they provide, which is the same thing they're selling as high res downloads. Are some of them upsampled? Probably. But also lots of them are new recordings in higher than redbook bit and sample rates, or new masterings of old stuff in higher than redbook bit and sample rates.

 

Spotify doesn't do 24 bit right? Just wondering. My wife has premium which I could add but I think that's only lossy.

 

Spotify keeps promising a "hifi" service of some sort -- not clear even what that will mean. They wanted to launch it as a premium tier but then Apple came out with redbook lossless at the basic price so Spotify put a hold on its plans. Paid Spotify resolution tops out a 32o kbps using Ogg Vorbis compression. I keep it actually because my wife uses it, and because it and Deezer have material that Qobuz doesn't have. If Spotify came out with a lossless service I'd ditch Deezer. Not ditching Qobuz -- it has the best sound and audio features and a pretty deep library, but not deep enough for me to keep only one service.

 

Reason I wanted to add it is my kid has some interesting taste in new music and I could just leach off his playlists. Wife already pays for the family plan and I could tell her to upgrade the SQ level I guess. Thinking about just adding a WiiM gadget.

 

I use Qobuz myself and we have a family Apple Music subscription. The issue of bandwidth / possible reduction in sound quality is easy enough to bypass by downloading the album one wants to listen to onto the playback device in the desired quality first. Doesn’t take long on a decent connection, and basically changes things to local file playback rather than streaming.

 

Spotify Premium 32okbps Ogg Vorbis is OK. It's certainly better than MP3 compression was, its not the horror that was. If she's paying she's getting the max resolution, lower res is on the ad-supported tier, though if you use the web player instead of the native app I don't think you get the highest bit rate IIRC. I dunno. I don't really use Spotify much.

 

I was going to see if I might contribute but this has been pretty well covered...

 

How do you defeat it on Qobuz? I've been looking but haven't found a way. I'm not even sure they do normalize, even though they say they do, given the way the Billie Elish songs knock my pictures off the wall when they come on.

 

I've typically been running these things through third party apps like Audirvana or Volumio, so you can turn normalization on and off in those. But I guess that could be an additional layer of normalization. I dunno what Qobuz does in the background. And you're right the mobile app at least doesn't have a normalization toggle, like Deezer does or Spotify does.

 

I sensing a slight jitter in this post of yours. Can you please rephrase it and preferably in lossless format (no abbreviations)?

 

Okay! The question of how “the same music sounds quite different” but not better or worse when played from a CD player compared with lossless Apple Music streaming via a DAC involves a wide range of possible variables including different mastering, levels, and the sound profiles of two different components, as others have observed.

Although the OP says “quite different,” the language used to describe the contrast makes it seem more like a subtle and unobjectionable difference. It seems like it’s not something to worry about or problematize or push into the FUD zone, as this forum tends to do when dealing with the concept that the same music can sound good despite various versions sounding different.

 

I worry more about my own personal listening devices—ears—day to day than I do about why things don't always sound the same on playback. Today's been a good day, though!

 

I loved many iMacs I've had but UGH the sound out of some of them was exactly what you say, noisy and gurgly and arg also blurg. Though that is not to do with "bits are bits" but rather all the analog stuff after that, yeah especially power supplies I believe.

 

AS @jfeldt and @bgiliberti say. The thing is that compared to the earliest transfers from analog tape, later the technology could allow theoretically superior sound. BUT that got thrown away by compression to make track "louder" even though in a digital system there is a hard maximum.

 

I believe it is both the power supplies (noise) and also the clocks in the devices, to avoid jitter.

Believed it was all a bit made up but finally heard the notable difference.

 

Qobuz hi-res downloads are legit. At least every single one I've purchased.

 

Forgot the 3rd option: 'over the air using Wifi'. No usb needed .

 

If she is paying you allready have premium quality! Get the Wiim .