My ears.
No just joking, YouTube music mostly. It’s convenient, available everywhere, has a large catalogue, and good enough quality for me.
With all respect you’re not the definition of an audiophile at all. If anything you’re kind of the opposite
Not everyone can discern the difference between a 96KHz FLAC and 256kbps AAC. I can’t. But I still can (barely) tell the difference between 256kbps AAC, and 96kbps AAC.
But I can tell if a song was well-engineered or a mess.
I believe those who can’t discern the difference between bitrates (especially on high bitrates), but have the appreciation for good music, good mixing, and good mastering, can still be considered audiophile.
That’s not the comparison at hand, we’re talking YouTube audio compression vs any actual music track.
Especially when your browser or application requests a high quality bitrate, youtube compression is opus 128.
A person could make the argument that it’s not lossless so it’s not worth listening to, but opus is extremely high quality especially at that bitrate.
If you wanna try it for yourself, take a flac or whatever, upload it to yt, then use something like yt-dlp -x that defaults to the highest quality to redownload just the audio stream.
As I get older and the abuse I put my ears through starts showing up, I completely agree. After upgrading my music library to FLAC from VBR mp3s, I stopped having the, “Oh! There’s a subtle instrument going on in this part of the song!” moments.
It doesn’t stop me from trying to listen to the highest quality music formats that I can get my hands on, but I 100% know if I think there’s a difference to my mid-40s ears, it’s probably a placebo.
FLACs from CDs, deemix-gui, qobuz-dl, and Soulseek. 102,000 songs. Play at home with Logitech Media Server. On the road I’ve transcoded it all to 128kbps Opus so i can fit it on a microsd card and I play it with PowerAmp. I mostly use Blessing2 Dusk earbuds with a Shanling MW200 bluetooth neckband, but sometimes also I use Focal Clear OG open-back over-ear cans with a qdelix 5k for bluetooth.
Audiophiles don’t listen to music, they listen to their headphones
„Audiophiles don’t use their equipment to listen to your music. Audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment.“
Alan Parsons
I dunno if that’s actually an Alan Parsons quote but up vote for any mention of his name. Does sound like something he’d say.
FLACs through PlexAmp, either to nice headphones ($500 range) or two channel stereo into some decent speakers with a decent subwoofer. I’d like to upgrade to “full range” speakers one day and save the subwoofer for movies.
PlexAmp does FLAC when connected to Wi-Fi but I have it set to transcode if I’m using mobile data.
At home it gets played through Chromecast Audios (R.I.P) which keeps it all digital until it hits my receiver.
I have converted all my CDs to FLAC and I mostly listen to my music collection in stereo speakers instead of headphones because I find the sound more natural. I have built my sound system around the moOde audio software.
Spotify through Sonos at home and work. Spotify on Google earbuds when out and about.
I used to really love music discovery on Spotify. I now find it’s the same ald songs over and over. It finds what you like and reinforces that rather than gradually expand it.
I agree on the discovery being crap on Spotify. I started to listen to the podcast NPR new music Fridays, and get my discovery that way nowadays.
Spotify -> MOTU M2 -> HiFiMan Ananda non-stealth
“High resolution” audio is completely useless for listening (16 bit 44.1 kHz is the best it gets) and there is little value in lossless encodes for listening purposes too, so I don’t get the point of all those “Hifi” streaming services.
If you own lossless encodes, I guess it doesn’t hurt to use them even for listening as storage is cheap these days.Speaking of which, I’d like to switch to purchasing my music though because Spotify will certainly continue on its path towards full enshittification. I want to be in a position where I own all my favourite music before Spotify will be infected with ads on premium plans. Oh and artists are somewhat more likely to be paid a little for their work that way (I hope…)
I plan to use the free YT music for discovery at that point.FLAC’s on NAS. Bluesound Node to stereo system, controlled with Roon. PlexAmp when remote.
Tidal is actually giving their lossless plan to their lower tier subscription, just got an email about it. Pretty nice.
My procedure is realistic and accessible unlike what a lot of people here have.
- Clean your ear wax.
- Insert eartips properly. Buy proper eartips with ideal sealing.
The above will decide about 30-40% of your hearing experience.
- Tangzu Fudu ($90) with Divinus Velvet eartips that come with it.
This decides 30% further.
- Download the highest quality audio file YouTube can provide (OPUS VBR 160kbps ≈ roughly above 256kbps MP3)
- Enjoy the music.
- If I really cherish some music even more, I get 320kbps MP3 or FLAC files via anywhere possible. Mostly this is not needed.
I enjoy the music on them, and they are top 5 relaxing, musical IEMs in the world as of now, and are easy to drive on even phones.
I use JetAudio+ on Android and Rhythmbox/foobar2000 on Linux/Windows.
Clean your ear wax.
How do you do it?
There exist earwax dissolver solutions. Consult a doctor or ENT specialist.
Cleaning out your ears is so huge.
deleted by creator
I use deemix to get songs and jellyfin/finamp to listen on my phone. I do miss the discovery of new music from things like Spotify or YouTube music. If anyone has suggestions for music discovery I’d love to hear about them.
CDs ripped to FLAC and streamed using Emby. I also use Amazon Music. At work I have a pair of ATH-M30x headphones I really like. At home ibhave some Sennheiser HD350, which are ok, but I don’t like them that much as they’re not that comfy. I prefer going through the hifi - Audiolab 6000A amp, Wharfedale Pacific Evo 40 floor standers and a Wiim mini. I also have a NAD C541i CD player. On my PC I go through a NAD C320 amp and Wharfedale Diamond 9.1 bookshelves.
Music collection as flac, navidrome as streaming server, symfonium as android app and B&W P5 or B&W Pi7 S2 for headphones.
I really wanted to like symfonium (even tho its not open source), bc it is a beautiful client, but it is a battery hog. I had to go back to ultrasonic.
I actually found all the subsonic clients to be quite heavy on my battery, so I just stuck with the one I liked the best.
I’ve got a special speaker assembly that I shove up my ass*. The bass response is particularly pleasing.
- this isn’t true.
