This really is driving a muscle/super car, or drinking expensive wine. At the end none of specs or tests matter. It is a form of art. If it makes the listener feel better (even if its just psychological) then its probably worth it.

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munchler 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

To expand on this a bit, I appreciate some audio overkill because, if I do hear sizzle or distortion, it eliminates one possible reason and helps me figure out what’s actually happening.

It’s like having gigabit internet to my house: I don’t actually need it, but when a website is slow, I know the problem isn’t in my internet connection.

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smilekzs an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Well, at least there are objective performance benchmarks on cars, and some of them are okay proxies of performance in motorsports.

https://www.carwow.co.uk/blog/carwow-quarter-mile-400-metre-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_N%C3%BCrburgring_Nords...

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meowface 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Correct. I've paid for Tidal for a decade because I just like the peace of mind that it's closer to the original recording. I'm sure it's mostly placebo, but I like it.

	▲	yellowapple an hour ago \| parent [-]
		It's also sort of an inverted “Van Halen demanding a bowl of M&Ms with the brown ones removed” thing for me, too. The vast majority of my Tidal listening happens over Bluetooth, so that 24bit/192kHz FLAC stream is just gonna get downsampled to 16bit/48kHz anyway because that's all any Bluetooth speaker or headset is capable of doing — but the fact that it's an option in the first place signals that other things are being done right, too (namely: that Tidal's whole “we're the streaming service that pays artists the most per listen” premise actually has some semblance of merit rather than being complete marketing bullshit; while recording quality ain't the strongest signal possible for that, it's certainly a good sign when musicians/publishers are willing to send over the highest-bitrate lossless recordings they've got and not just the same ol' compressed-to-shit MPEG audio you can yank off YouTube for free).

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wat10000 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'd distinguish between differences that anyone can detect but some may not care about, and differences that may not be objectively detectable at all. Muscle cars, at least, are different in a way that anyone can see. Push that pedal to the floor and it feels different from a Honda Civic or whatever. Whether that difference is actually interesting or good is, of course, a matter of taste. Whereas audiophile nonsense is often indistinguishable even to the connoisseur and depends entirely on some form of self-deception. Still could be worth it, depending on what one considers worthy.

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mock-possum 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That’s actually a really good comparison, especially because - yes I can hear the difference between an excruciatingly lossless digitization of a piece of music that I’m intimately familiar with, played back on expertly configured hardware… but the difference is so little, that most of the time, I’m find just listening to it at medium high quality streaming on a pair of <$50 headphones.

I’ve played with the nice toys, and they are nice, but for 100x the price, they barely deliver 1.5x the experience.