this post was submitted on 09 Jul 2024
198 points (97.6% liked)
Asklemmy
44176 readers
1954 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- [email protected]: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Hi-fi stereo systems with amplifiers, speakers and cables.
I could be wrong, but I think that old stereo systems generally have way better sound quality than Bluetooth systems, soundbars and the like. Physical media such as CDs or even Flac files (etc.) are of course impractical compared to streaming, but the audio quality is much higher.
However, since you can also stream audio without any problems, I would recommend every music fan to buy a used stereo system with high-quality speakers from the 2000s or even from the late 90s - in my opinion, excellent audio quality at a low price.
Bluetooth is low bitrate. The audio codecs need to use a lot of compression. Old audio equipment are analog which is better because it doesn't have so much digital conversions to completely wreck sound.
Bluetooth is still reliant on its original SBC codec from the early 2000s or something. 20 year old tech. Due to this nobody really took BT audio adoption seriously until the past several years when the zeitgeist finally tipped. Suddenly wireless headphones were every where.
I think maybe it was when Apple got rid of headphone jack. So the rest of the industry caved. And we all just handwave away how bluetooth audio has always sucked.
For compatibility every device maker sticks to that 20 year old common denominator. There are proprietary codecs that are supposed be better quality but then you get all the joys of cross compatibility hell. If your devices aren't inter-compatible they'll fall back to the common denominator. The basic SBC codec. Even with better quality codec they can only do so much with limited wireless bitrate.
Fun fact. There is higher quality configuration for the SBC codec but nobody configures it in software when making their device. People say it's indistinguishable from the highest quality proprietary codecs. But audio can subjective so eh...
Even if you were to enable the better configuration for SBC. All the devices out there in the world are built with the default configuration. No two devices sender/receiver will ever both use the better config. So it's impossible to fix this.
It doesn't matter anymore since all this in the process of being superseded by Bluethooth 5 audio. Which throws away all that and tries to do it all over again. It's still reliant on low bitrate wireless protocol though. So they can use whatever algorithmic trickery so they can claim produce perceptually indistinguishable from CD quality or lossless quality or whatever.
I'm sure there will always be people that say they can tell the difference. I don't doubt people can because it's simply not the same audio but a disassembly into bits for wireless transmission. Then reconstituted on the other-side as near as possible to the original.
Oh, wow. Thanks for the in-depth explanation - very interesting. I had never really looked into the technical details. Well, I suppose I'm lucky that my reasonably new smartphone still has a 3.5mm audio jack, so I can continue to use my now rather old, but in my opinion still pretty good, headphones. It wasn't that easy to find a new smartphone with an audio jack, but then it looks like I've actually done everything right when it comes to listening to music.
They haven't gone though