How to Differentiate Lossless From Lossy Music

[zeus]

My challenge from the other topic still stands:

@zeus

But I don’t want you to take my word for it. I want you to try your ears out. If you’re curious, hit me up on the side. I’m going to send you a ZIP file of snippets of three versions of the same track: one 320 MP3, one ALAC sourced from PCM, and one ALAC sourced from DSD. I only need you to do two things:

1. Configure your system to play back the highest quality possible. On Windows, this is really simple. Right click the Volume icon, then click “Sound Settings”, then pick your audio device, and select the highest option it supports. If you have 24/96, you’re in good company.

2. Configure your audio player to use WASAPI (if possible), or Direct Sound (if WASAPI is not possible). Foobar2000 is not configured to use WASAPI out of the box, you have to download WASAPI output support from here and then configure fb2k to use WASAPI output in “Library → Configure → Playback → Output → Device”. This is how mine is set.

3. Share your findings with everyone else here!

One thing I forgot to add (so consider it 2.5) is that if you do any type of software signal processing, you want to make sure it’s checked there too. I switched up my whole set up just two days ago, so now I plug my HD600 straight into the headphone jack of my desktop.

Normally that would be taboo, right? But check this out.

Yeah, this thing can spit out 32/96. In fact, it can spit out 32/384, but for whatever reason Windows 11 doesn’t like that. A problem for another day, I suppose. But if you’re doing what I’m doing, make sure you configure it there too!