POLL Lossy Streaming Sound Quality

Spoiler

A was kinda wonky, I'm getting that uncanny valley effect. B was kinda dead. I think both are lossy, just different levels of lossy. EDIT: re-read, it is lossy lol.
ZX2 > Andros, Pietus > PortaPro

 

Spoiler

Yep! I made sure to get the exact same version of the song from the same release of the album up on both streaming platforms just to eliminate as many variables as possible. This one's from No Need to Argue: The Complete Sessions (1994-1995).

 

Spoiler

For completeness, here are the L & R spectra of the difference file:



And the frequency analysis:



Linear frequency scale on the former to highlight the higher frequencies, log scale on the latter because tradition - and because it highlights quite a big difference in the bass content, 20-200 Hz, more than I would have expected just from eyeballing the 2 individual files. Note also the peak centred on ~3k (also more than I would have thought) and the 15-20k peak spotted by @roderickvd .

Now we need to see which files have the greater/lesser magnitudes in the bass & upper-mid areas. But no matter how I fool with Audacity's spectrogram display settings, I can't discern contrasts for differences this small.

 

Is it time to stop with the spoilers yet?

Spoiler

Massively magnifying the vertical scales of the frequency-content plots and comparing side-by-side, it's file B that has more of everything - in both peaks and troughs. As the screenshot in the post above shows, the magnitude of the difference varies with frequency.

Funny, to me A had the subjectively slammier bass but it's B that has the (fractionally) higher bass SPLs. Could this suggest (gasp) that it's not all about frequency content?

OTOH A did seem to me to have more distortion in the bass, and randomly using the analyzer on a few different bass frequencies does indicate 2-3% higher for A than B. Maybe coincidence at these levels though.

 

Honestly the spoilers are kinda silly at this point and I'm just having fun reading along trying to figure out how things correlate to what I'm hearing. This is all great fun albeit above my brain capacity hahaha

 

Definitely not all about frequency content (and related bitrate) but also the *way* the codecs process the audio in and out. What I like about this poll is that more bitrate in my ears did not equate to more better.

 

The funny thing to me was that when taking a bird's eye view of the waveforms it was actually Spotify very high that was pushing the quieter bits upwards, per here (just that on closer inspection it did look like YTM high quality was actually more compressed on an instantaneous level (this is a different song I wanted to look into ergo why it looks very much NOT like the Cranberries):

YouTube Music - top; Spotify - bottom


YouTube Music RMS


Spotify RMS


Plus visualisation from someone else on Discord who's using a program I'm unfamiliar with (think this is Fabfilter Pro Q?) where Spotify here (RED) seems slightly louder overall compared to YouTube Music (GREY) with some more notable discrepancies in the very low bass and above around 5kHz.

 

Spoiler

I listened to the clips on my desktop system in two ways. (1) my Dell Desktop's DAC, a LEPAI LP-2020TI amplifier, B&W 600DM Series 3 speakers; (2) the same desktop, an iFi Audio Uno DAC/amp, Hifiman HE-400se headphones. In both cases, I found clip B (my favorite) to have clearer highs and less muddy bass. My preference was stronger with the the speaker setup. With the headphone setup, the lossy nature of the clips seemed to be emphasized; I still preferred clip B but wondered whether the clip A "sound" would be more pleasant for long-time listening.