Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Apple Music, Spotify and Tidal: a blind audio quality test”.
Hey i’m chris apple music just launched and with it all new questions about audio quality. Now all these major streaming services stream at different rates, you have apple music at 256, kilobits per second aac encoded. Then you have spotify at 320 kilobits per second mp3 encoded, and then you have title which streams lossless at 1.4 megabits per second, so all of these services have different streaming rates. What does it mean in the real world? Well, we wanted to find out. So we invited a few of our colleagues to come in here and do a blind test. Let’S see which one is really best to run this test, we played three different songs across three different genres, hip, hop, pop and classical. We also had a full range of audio snobbery in the hot seat, ranging from the casual listener nearly indistinguishable to me to the hardcore audio file.
I can’t tell if, like it’s the sound profile of these headphones, that i’m not used to digital audio converter, yo. No digital data, no matter what kind of music we like one thing brings us together our endless desire to describe music with colorful adjectives crisp. I guess i like crunchy a little crunchy.
The second one was less booby in the base. Uh there was like a different ramp up on it on each of them, like less mushy, washing like higher a little tinier, but can people actually tell what’s better uh? I think i like three best. The first one sounded the worst.
The highs actually uh clipped, really high uh, really uh aggressively. This is day day never mind. This is the data.
This is the real data. The first one was definitely the weakest. Three was the best with maybe three sounding the best preserve the highs a little better.
I would assume that the third one would have the widest bandwidth this one’s like fine, but it’s like kind of like whatever dude says. I’M thinking this is apple uh. I think the one in the middle is my choice for the top quality. I felt like the second one was the best one.
The base was like really pronounced, and this last one sounded the best cool uh three was best this one’s absolute trash uh. So the first one sounded the worst. It sounds a little more like complex than the first one in the horns anyway, too crunchy. I know she likes crunchy horns, but i feel like they’re crunchy. In a way she didn’t want this one’s good. I think this one definitely sounds the best more definition across the range.
No, i think third one was the best more more texture, more sound. Third one was definitely the best uh of those three it sounded to me like the second one would have been the flag. It had the most definition in the base and in the highs. If i had to say like i would say the last one was the best, but i don’t know like it had a less complex range of things going on, but two sounded the lowest out of those.
Second one was the worst. So what have we learned from this experiment? Well, not very much. It wasn’t that title with its lossless 1.4 megabit streaming was winning every time. In fact, it wasn’t winning a majority of the time now.
Part of this might be that we’re using very average headphones connected to a phone, and, if you had this on, say a home audio system with very expensive components, very expensive, headphones, very expensive loudspeakers. You would be able to tell the difference, but if you’re just using this as a mobile audio service, a mobile streaming service, it doesn’t seem to matter .