Intentionally doing it wrong

[Brian Hall]

I was curious how much difference I could hear with a "bad" setup.

I'm listening to Qobuz's Best of Classical 2023 playlist. Qobuz says it is playing Hi-Res 96.0k. The only streaming device is my Asus Chromebox (ASUS Chromebox 5 with Intel® Core i5-1240P Processor, 16GB ram, 2tb ssd) running the latest version of the android Qobuz app. Output is with Bluetooth from the Chromebox to Sennheiser Momentum 4 headphones.

No extra dac. Just whatever is in the Chromebox. I know it shouldn't, but it actually sounds good. I know it is not lossless.

Why doesn't this combination sound "bad"? No buffering. No dropouts until I was 65 feet away from my office. I expected worse.

 

[sergeauckland]

I would ask this the other way round:- Why would you not expect this to sound good?
If you measure frequency response, noise and distortion, you will most probably find that all are well below audibility, so nothing to make it sound bad.

S