Audio Bitrate Quality
Discussions center on whether high-bitrate lossy audio codecs like MP3, AAC, or Opus (e.g., 128-320kbps) are perceptually indistinguishable from lossless formats, with references to blind tests, placebo effects, sampling rates, and playback hardware.
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Not just acceptable. For most people it's basically indistinguishable from uncompressed CD audio.
Why not stream in ~256kbps AAC or Opus? The audible quality drop is objectively proven to be zero. Make peace with the placebo effect and enjoy your life.
I'm not sure what bitrate they use, but if it's 128kbps+ the difference in quality should be small to nonexistent.
Can you hear the difference between 320 kbit/s mp3 and lossless formats?
Its not about bitrate, its about sampling and advertising nonsense only Bats could hear.
Are you doing the encoding and performing A/B tests yourself? There are all kinds of things that can hurt audio fidelity a lot worse than bitrate. Some MP3's are poorly encoded by some crappy shareware application. Some are transcoded from an already-lossy source. Some productions will compress better than others (supposedly, some producers actually mix and master with inevitable compression in mind).
Why waste a bunch of bandwidth on 96 kHz when 44.1 is fine?
That's only true for uncompressed audio.
Why do 96 or 128khz sampled audio files sound better than 48khz ones? I blind tested and could always tell the difference between them, but not between 128 and 192
Your Airpods are recompressing everything to 256kbps AAC to transmit over bluetooth. So once again, psychoacoustic bias.