Hi everyone,
I have wondered, as I'm sure many of you did, if my system could play music well enough to let me distinguish between lossy and lossless streaming music. I'd tried comparing my FLAC CD rips to the same album streaming on Spotify (I don't have Tidal/Qobuz) and honestly couldn't hear the difference, but wasn't sure because I couldn't switch instantly between the sources.
I found this website (
http://abx.digitalfeed.net/#) that has an ABX test with five music samples, played five times each, covering a range of music types. Sadly I couldn't tell them apart, scoring 52% and 48%. I intend to try different speakers, tweaks, speaker positions to see if I can find some sonic signature that stands out.
I just noticed that if you dig around they have other tests: like can you identify the "X" when one candidate is lossless and the other is a 96k encoded mp3! I mean...surely...right?
If someone scores much higher than 50% PLEASE reply here and share details of your system!
I'm running an Outlaw RR2160 amp, Mission 774 tower speakers (they were about $US 1200 twenty years ago), generic monoprice cable. I used a laptop as my source, once with USB into the Outlaw using its internal DAC, and a second test using my Dragonfly Black to feed the Outlaw's aux socket. Both times I played the music around 75 db, peaking at 80db.