Album Rating: 3.5

Schiit (HAHAHA) Valhalla and Gungnir

Album Rating: 4.5

Dude! Nice to see more audiophiles here!

We should have our own thread to discuss stuff without boring the plebeians.

PS: Just being sarcastic of the attitude many audiophiles have (which is kind of true though HAH!), just in case haha

Album Rating: 4.0

I can't afford that sort of stuff sadly, but I can't really say it makes me more receptive to people criticising people whining about the production. Two sides of the same coin.

Album Rating: 3.5

ngl I bought that system because those names sound badass

Album Rating: 4.5 | Sound Off

RIP thread

Album Rating: 3.5

I wouldn't call myself an audiophile really, I'm just interested in what textures an album's production gives an album. I don't really give a shit what DR number an album has

I don't care about the number itself but it makes it easier to bitch that I wish every album were dr8 or higher

Album Rating: 3.5

what's dr? dick radius?

Album Rating: 4.5

Hahahahahah! Yeah Dynamic range is very important to enjoy music for me. Sometimes there are exceptions of albums that doesn't end up being fatiguing with low DR, but 95% of the time is just unbearable. I listen to a lot of classical and jazz music and it's a night and day difference. Being able to crank up an album and still enjoy it. People like Rick Rubin ruined metal and hard rock productions. Hell, there is even a name for it, Loudness War. If you are interested in DR of albums this is the best database: https://dr.loudness-war.info/

It wasn't always like this guys. Music used to be way more dynamic, that's why original CDs from the 80s are always very crankable. It's very sad that some people grew up listening to music compressed and brickwalled af. If you want a good read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war

Edit: I don't want to bore you all but this is very important for me nowadays. I used to think audiophiles and people concerned with such "nonsense" were freaky snobs, until I started to do audio tests and started to listen to old CDs. It was a revelation. Music breathes way more naturally

my man

DR more like AR, the album's deserved rating

yea it's dick radius
late to this subject but Spotify premium is just 320kbps audio and I've never noticed anything wrong with it despite being a pretty fussy individual historically. I would prefer lossless audio but the truth is that I can tell the difference infrequently enough that it might as well be a coin flip. perhaps my ears have simply been ravaged by age

Album Rating: 3.5

Depends on what you listening to. Listen to Still Life on Spotify and then the flacs and tell me you can't hear the difference

Album Rating: 4.0

@Frost15 interesting, cheers for that. Always despised friends whacking a lot of metal to high volumes and having no clue why it never bothers me for other/older works, but I know next to nothing about things like this.

Album Rating: 4.5

Audio frequency and bit-depth is way less important than production itself (dynamic range, instruments panning, etc...) If you don't have trained ears it's really difficult to tell the difference between flac and 320kbs most of the time, so 320kbps is fine. The criticism must be focused on production practices. Being able to have music in lossless formats is amazing though. I've done blind tests with lots of high-res formats (FLAC 48-24, 96-24, 192-24, DSD64, DSD128) and once you have it in lossless, differences are nearly imposible to perceive so you enter the snake oil market pretty easily tbh. The best way to see if you can hear any difference is blind tests and most times I haven't been able to tell 96-24 and higher res audio from 48-24.

It's very important to take into account how the album was recorded because there are many companies milking the cow by upsampling records digitally, which is basically selling the chips more expensive via making their bag bigger by introducing more air.

Im not sure what people are complaining about with the production, do they really mean the mastering? Does the wall of sound not sound right on bass heavy muffled headphones or something? I dont have the best equipment ever, this album sounds good technically to me.

Album Rating: 3.5

It's a bit flatter compared to, say, leviathan or bm but not to the point of it ruining the experience

Album Rating: 4.5

Yeah, that's true Pika.

I could tell about 75-80% of the time in blind testing which means I could *not* tell a decent amount of the time, and might even just be getting lucky.
but this is just me coping because I don't want to store thousands of flacs anymore.
@kevnb: like the vast majority of modern releases, the master is pretty loud (or very compressed). for me it's not among the more egregious examples but it could sound a lot better than it does

@Frost15 luckily that doesn't have much effect on most people, as they don't even understand what people are talking about and they just "know" spotify is the bet because influencers said so. Every website also claims the sony wh-1000xm4 are the best headphones, they sound mediocre at best with eq.

keep in mind that hi-res files won't magically fix anything from the standard editions unless it's at least a dedicated master, and even then in this album's case the brickwalling is the least of its problems so a good sounding version likely doesn't even exist. Maybe the vinyl could have a more dynamic mastering but the mix will still be the one we fight over