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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Spotify is horrible quality for 2023

    To my surprise, even Spotify’s standard (not high or very high) is extremely difficult, if not practically impossible for the average consumer to differentiate from lossless (on better than consumer grade hardware). Upon hearing this, me and several friends decided to test it for ourselves by taking lossless files for several songs and resampling them to the same codec and bitrates that Spotify’s standard quality uses, then ABX testing the before and after with Foobar’s ABX and exclusive mode plugins (also tried the popular comparison website, but that’s apparently less accurate). One of my friends had access to a college studio, I have a dac and sennheiser, and the third had sony wxm4s. To our surprise, none of us could consistently differentiate the two. Its not perfect considering we didn’t grab the outputs directly from the streaming platforms, but that would’ve added extra variables like volume normalizing (louder sounds better).

    Our conclusion is that the quality “difference” is likely placebo and probably a waste of bandwidth.













  • XMPP’s current server implementations may be better, but I feel like its something Matrix will match in the future. I’m not very well educated on the topic, but Element being generally user friendly and having lots of features similar to Discord brings a massive audience to privacy respecting, federated, encrypted messaging which is a huge advantage for being able to message regular people. If Matrix’s server matures to the point of XMPP in the future (and clients if they’re not already), would XMPP have any advantages?