Music streaming Services: People can't hear the difference apparently...

[TazSob]

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/08/05/hifi-...y-hear-it.html

[lovejoy]

For the most part I would agree with these findings, but as far as I am concerned, all of the streaming services are inferior to playing a CD or your own rip of the CD.

I find that Spotify on mobile devices sounds awful, even at 320kbps, but on a properly setup Windows PC, I have a very hard time telling the difference between 320kbps Spotify, or Tidal HiFi. In fact, I probably couldn't tell the difference at all. A different story if I compare Tidal HiFi against my own rips of the same music though. For a lot of the stuff I play it sounds to me as if when Tidal did their CD ripping, they hit the 'normalise' button to make everything hit the same volume level. My own rips tend to have a lot more dynamic range and are less fatiguing to listen to.
For this reason, I see no point in paying for premium streaming anymore.