Quote:
Originally Posted by LexxM3
Since you have the car, it's an easy test for yourself. I am not just intentionally being an ass (that's usually natural rather than intentional), it is that only you can really decide in your own environment and your own media. A few comments to support this assertion:
- lots of people here recommend Tidal so I gave it a serious shot; nothing wrong with it and their artist remunerations ARE apparently better than Spotify, but it didn't make enough of a difference against Spotify in any of my tested environments (including G05 HK system) to justify re-confusing my family and their existing playlists on Spotify, so I didn't subscribe after the trial; that's a me decision, I am 100% certain many others have different priorities
- a long time ago I had made some money and was convinced by my best friend to upgrade my main audio system including way better speakers, amp, and CD player; one of worst decisions of my life (not really, still happy with that equipment); the problem is once you have good equipment, you learn that lots of recordings are crap; I couldn't bear to listen to some of my favourite CDs at the time
- I am/was a broadcast television/video engineer in the first part of my career; my company led the transition to digital in broadcast and broadcast quality and broadcast compression is way above consumer visual quality; I literally couldn't watch anything on consumer digital cable or consumer digital satellite for a decade after stopping work on broadcast equipment until my eyes/brain finally mostly stopped seeing the compression artifacts instead of the artistic content itself; I still notice it constantly (and now with adaptive streaming), but it only triggers an internal sardonic smile now
Point is, once you start down the path of improving audio/visual quality, nothing will ever be good enough again and it quite literally takes some of the enjoyment out of the music and video content itself. At least it did for me.
Having said all that, I am in the process of re-ripping all my CDs to FLAC for archival purposes and since storage is cheap now, using FLAC in the X5 as well — doesn't hurt and simpler by having fewer duplicates.
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A lot of truth in this post and echos some of my experiences as well. Music has always been a major part of my life. I was a classically trained pianist, started playing at age 5. stopped as a teenager as sports took over, which was fine as i was fortunate to play baseball in college.
not only did i play music but also grew up as a serious audiophile. my system would grow and improve over the years and loved every second of it. fortunately my brother is a manufacturer in the high end audio accessories industry. I have access to the best gear in the world.
I always had a dedicated listening room in the house which was great, but as any audiophile knows the room is the limiting factor. Great gear in a crappy room will sound like crap. the room had some faults but i always loved it and had some amazing sound. Still on the quest for sonic nirvana (it is like a drug) i built a purpose built structure in my yard. think pool house but for audio LOL. Everything from electrical, sound treatments, etc. was built with a single focus. My wife used to laugh/complain that my room only had 1 chair in it lol. Not that she would ever want to sit there and listen - because, most people are unable to actually just "sit" and listen to music. the new room was the same. one chair and btw, this was 2 channel audio only. no video, no surround, etc. I had tens of thousands of LP's and CD's in my collection.
The "room" took quite a bit of time to build but came out absolutely beautiful and sounded amazing. I had many manufacturers come thru that were awe struck with the sound.
This all came with a serious negative. the ever ending chase for perfect sound - both from the hardware and software. I can't tell you how many copies of Sgt. Pepper i have on LP LOL. British, mono, stereo, first pressing, etc. etc. From just a hardware perspective - turntable, tone arm, cartridge, amp, preamp, DAC, transport, speakers the retail price of the system was well into the 6 figures.
Most people would kill for such a setup and i'm extremely fortunate I was able to put something like this together. I've since sold off everything and the pool house is actually now a pool house! I was unable to enjoy the music for the sake of the music. Every listening session turned into a critical review. As mentioned above, most recordings are awful. Play an awful recording on such a system and it's frustrating. The warts come thru so completely it's amazing.
It is interesting how certain genres and specifically, certain artists are so consistent with the quality of sound on their recordings. Both good and bad. I was always amazed how an artist, or their mastering engineer could listen back to a recording and say "yep, that sounds good".
Anyway, enjoy the music on whatever you listen with and if it sounds good to you then it's good.