who says they notice no difference between youtube/spotify 128kbps and a 1000kbps flac... uh... clean your ears? and try again with some half decent headphones if you don't have that.

yes most audiophile stuff is over the top but audio file bitrate is noticeable lol

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@vib
>no difference spotify 128kbps - flac
I'm gonna kill someone...

With youtube, things are a bit more nuanced.
Haven't used Youtube Music, but the normal Youtube can give you either AAC audio at only 128kbps, or opus audio (in 3 tiers of quality). The highest opus tier, can sometimes go enough over 128kbps that it is plausible that it achieves transparency (but that of course only if the audio uploaded was lossless to begin with).

I know it's hard to believe, but opus really is that fucking good.
Audiophiles will say MP3 achieves transparency at 320kbps (for me it doesn't, ever), AAC at 256kbps (for me, it barely does, but I would call it confirmed) and OPUS begins to be transparent at 128kbps (I go with 160kbps to be absolutely safe). Results are from double blind ABX tests.

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@alyx @vib i haven't had complaints with youtube since opus became what comes out of -f bestaudio. but, eh, i have some flac files here lets try frying them up a bit :blobcatread:
@alyx @vib more specifically these are flacs i ripped using exact audio copy some years ago :ablobcatnod:

320k :blobcatverified:
128k :blobcatverified:
64k :blabcatverified:

(fdk_aac, not using HE profile)
@alyx @vib i think this comes down to what the song actually is. at this point AAC vs Opus listening tests tend to be like, "oh no this very specific set of rare orchestral woodwinds is slightly camfier than it should be in the xiph codec" so it could be that they listen to a lot of shitty pop music that fits well within the model.

@icedquinn @vib
The audiophiles I've come across seem to listen to a lot of orchestra or classic music. Or older rock music. Generally, if a codec handles instrumental music well, it handles everything else too. So that's usually the benchmark.

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