Please repeat this when people say "there's no reason to use sample rates above 44 kHz". While it's true for source material, it should be properly caveated.
"greater than 44 kSamp/s", not "<44 kSamp/s"
"ADCs" should be "DACs". While it's still correct, it isn't on-topic.
But, a lot of popular music out there isn’t mastered for that use case (high end ABX testing). On the contrary, there are tons of CDs that are extremely compressed (in the dynamic range sense) so as to sound as loud as possible on the radio [1]. If you compare one of these CDs with an earlier (or even contemporary) vinyl release which has been mastered correctly then of course the vinyl will sound better!
Unfortunately, because we’re dealing with a Wild West of media, new and old, floating around in the marketplace we don’t have the luxury of a perfect ABX comparison, and so people will continue to buy and prefer old formats. It is for that reason that we can’t dismiss them.
For example, much of the great early Bluenote jazz was recorded by RVG in the living room of his parents' home in New Jersey. [1]
Until it is resampled in the noisy OS mixer and/or lossy compressed again to be sent over Bluetooth. Very few ABX studies consider the effect of such modern "digital signal chains", especially transcoding. It's much better to start with FLAC.
But saying this without mentioning the loudness wars misses the main force behind vinyl's staying power.
This is like making an argument for transistor guitar amps. They're better on paper, but tubes produce a type of distortion that is pleasing to many listeners.
E.g. when Dylan's famous 60's electric trilogy first came out on CD, at least two of those albums had to be remixed not for whatever possible artistical and/or money-making reasons [1] that commonly cause remixes to be done these days, but simply because the original master tapes (including the safety copies) had worn out through continuous re-pressings of the original vinyl albums.
[1] Though of course the switch to CD in itself was, while also undeniably a definitive technological upgrade, in some ways also a nice way of making people buy the albums again even if they already owned them in some other storage format.
Doesn't sound very scientific to me.
> How does the audio quality compare?
Why compare with an old system from the 80s? I got to hear a friend's friend's modern audiophile setup. A dedicated room with Wilson Audio speakers (totally overpriced but amazing), high-end DAC, high-end amp... It was bliss. One of these $50K+ setup but bliss. This is nothing like a laptop, a soundbar or a Sonos.
> Or do the new multi room systems play in the same league as the old system that were used by enthusiasts?
I wouldn't be suprised they'd actually be better than these old systems. But they don't play in the same league as actual modern audiophile setups.
From my experience with them, you kind of just summed up the HiFi/audiophile core. I've spent waaay too much time with audio engineers, recording engineers, etc from edit bays to sound stages. Yes, there are now things that I can hear because they pointed it out to me, but until then, I was perfectly content with my head in the sand of not-knowing. However, while I agree there are certain things that can make a difference, the tendency for the absurd always seems to take hold.
To be fair you can have a similarly great experience on significantly more affordable setups around 10k.
DAC and amplification above a certain price range is basically good enough to become indistinguishable from one another. The largest part of your budget should go into speakers. And don't underestimate the effects of proper room treatment and correction. Solutions like Dirac Live have made this much more approachable.
Anything above that will provide very marginal gains. There's a lot of costly prestige above that threshold which doesn't always translate into real audible benefits.
What do you mean? What's the difference between an audiophile setup from the 80s GP was mentioning and one from today? Today you'd have a DAC, for a start. Maybe some DRC (Digital Room Correction software). Then amps have progressed tremendously. And so did speakers (newer materials).
As for the setup I listened to: I'm no pro, I don't remember the details. I know the speakers were Wilson Audio but I don't remember the DAC nor the amp(s) brands: all I know is it was high-end stuff costing money I'm personally not willing to put in an audio setup. But it did sound very good.
Meanwhile, mass-market audio has gotten better but not consistently. The speakers are usually the limiting factor for quality: you can have at most any two of small speakers, deep bass, or volume for a given power budget. Lots of consumer systems go for small speakers and don't have either deep bass or high volume.
Does sound quality matter? That's an individual choice. It's available to you at a much lower cost than ever before in history.
Once you do lossless -> lossy, you're "stuck", unless you accept reencoding artifacts and those do add up to eventually be bad.
I'm an audio enthusiast, have quality (but not excessive, triple digit prices) DACs, amps and everything else. I can't ABX 256kbps+ MP3s from lossless, but the above stands.
Just compare the original earbuds included with the iPod to the wired EarPods that Apple sells now.
Or compare the AirPods Pro ($249) to what the same amount (inflation adjusted) could get you 20 years ago.
Of course there’s still plenty of space on the high end, and still the higher you go the more you need to spend to achieve 1% better sound.
These absolutely still exist. What's changed, to an extent, is that they're a bit less fashionable; whereas in the 80s any self-respecting rich person needed a hifi that cost as much as a small house, today, this is largely the preserve of (rich) enthusiasts.
The vast majority of people would have had relatively low cost stereo systems which were, by and large, far worse than their modern contemporaries, tho.
My guess: >90% of music consumers don't care about quality as long as it's good enough. What they care is ease of use. Why should they have a complicated setup and try getting their records in lossless FLAC when they can just go onto Spotify / Apple Music / YouTube and press play.
I've seen lot's of people that don't even care that their audio has the intro parts when playing from youtube. So why should they care for HiFi.
Apple Music has lossless now.
Same, but at home I also play directly the FLAC files (laptop / DAC / amp / floorstanding loudspeakers). They're not that much bigger than 320 kbps mp3 files.
I convert to lossy for my car, which takes mp3 files but not FLAC.
I used to collect mp3s back in the Napster days. My HDD was maybe 40 GB back then (?), maybe not even that. Nowadays FLAC files size aren't a concern. I think a screenshot of my screen takes more room than a song FLAC encoded.
Interestingly, a study suggests that room acoustics don't negatively affect the sound of good speakers, and what that means is that for listening, acoustics don't matter as much as they do for recording.
This ain’t true - for example Bluetooth is lossy compression.
‘Digital’ doesn’t mean lossless from the source.
> The signal is digital until it gets to the speaker so there is no loss of quality after the initial encoding
isn't true - the original encoding is decoded... and re-encoded, losslessly, by the Bluetooth protocol.
Literally says ‘Bluetooth’ in the original comment.
"and then sent over Wifi or Bluetooth"
the information about lossless was informative.
In the 80s and 90s some people were going crazy over HiFi, only the absolute high end products were just good enough. I remmeber seeing stereo systems for 50,000$ and more. CDs were already seen as inferior to records quality-wise, and speakers had to be huge if possible.
Today Wifi speakers are all the rage. The music is downloaded (precompressed) and then sent over Wifi or Bluetooth with (sometimes very) limited bandwidth to a single speaker which has the size of a laptop.
How does the audio quality compare? Is it like day and night? Or do the new multi room systems play in the same league as the old system that were used by enthusiasts? I often have the feeling that overall sound quality does not matter anymore as long as the bass is strong enough, but as I said at the beginning, my ears are not very sensitive.