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Originally Posted by choc e-Claire
You see, this seems like you're saying 'you shouldn't be listening to the music if you can't get it at higher quality'. Which sucks, because not all of us have piles of cash to go out and buy records.
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I actually do identify as an audiophile
(I follow the subreddits after all), and am not a wealthy person by any stretch of the imagination.
Something tells me Soups does too, but he's too bashful to admit it:
A large majority of audiophile claims are based on pure placebo effects. I went down the rabbit hole w/ turntable equipment, cartridges, headshell leads, vintage receivers, etc... the difference was negligible more often than not. The cartridge and speakers were what mattered most tbh. Everything else was superfluous as long as your tracking wasn't off.
Vinylheads will pay an awful lot of money just to get their records to sound 'better'. There's a concept called diminishing returns which many audiophiles just don't seem to grasp.
Records are snake oil imho. Objectively, they don't even offer the full frequency range that something like a flac or wav file have. People enjoy records mainly for the physicality, large artwork, and that warm sound flavoring people seem to adore so much.
If I had a dollar for every time some bozo wouldn't shut up about how much better vinyl sounded and then proceeded to play me something on their suitcase Crosley turntable w/ the bult in aluminum foil speakers... I'd have enough $$ to pay my Google Play Music sub for a month.
Speaking of which, GPM offers 320kbps... as does Spotify if you pay for it. Not sure where Soups is pulling this 32kbps crap from. Maybe I missed something in the thread, but what you're listening to should be 10x whatever he's ranting on about.
Uncompressed audio is legit though if you have the speakers/headphones for it, and the song is properly mastered (notice all the variables at play).
What matters most is your equipment's ability to reproduce all this signal properly, and your ears' personal ability to pick up on the difference. I've fooled a few self-proclaimed audiophiles in a blind sound test on a friend's $3k pair of loudspeakers once.
WHAT MATTERS EVEN MORE THAN MOST IS HOW GOOD THE MUSIC SOUNDS TO YOU AND IF YOU ENJOY HOW THE MUSIC SOUNDS. FIND SPEAKERS/HEADPHONES WHICH COMPLEMENT YOUR DESIRED SOUND SIGNATURE AND YOU SHOULD BE MORE THAN GOOD TO GO. THE DIFFERENCE HERE IS VERY REAL AND 'FLAVORING' YOUR MUSIC CAN BE ADDICTIVE
Nevertheless...
https://www.slsknet.org/
Try Soulseek if you have a PC/Mac of your own. You can download flac and other lossless files by searching like 'Pixies flac', 'Blur flac' , etc, or whatever else floats your boat. It's good stuff. I pay for a GPM subscription simply because it lets me watch Youtube w/o ads. If it weren't for that I'd likely just download flac via slsk.
Still, the biggest difference is the file size, and like I said, mp3 ain't much worse and many audiophiles can be fooled without knowing which is which beforehand. Placebo, snake oil, etc.
Hope that helps.
Tl;dr: you'll do yourself a lot more good by saving up for some decent bookshelf speakers and a subwoofer than wasting any of that cash on records. Seriously.