Long time music lover. Newbie audiophile.

[Salseca]

This is my first post on this forum - which I find incredibly informative and educational. My first question is this: I use Google Play Music as my primary audio file source on my LG V30ThinQ smart phone. The quad DAC from ESS built into the phone is incredible when I use LG's music app to listen to the 50 or so tracks I have downloaded myself to my phone. I have a library of over a thousand songs on Google play music that I mostly always use. I'm wondering what bit rate and file type these Google downloads are. There is no file type information anywhere in the play music app. Just a download quality option in settings (which is set to high quality for both streaming and downloads). I should mention that I'm listening through a set of psb M4U2 over ear headphones. Any insight into my drawn out question about Google's play music file type would be greatly appreciated as I've noticed that the LG music player sounds like it utilizes the DAC much more than play music. Cheers!

 

[SegaCD]

According to this long-ish thread, "Google streams music at 320kbps High, 192kbps Normal, and 128kbps Low using the MP3 codec."

So it looks like you have 320kbps MP3s coming down the pipe. Hope this helps.

 

[Salseca]

According to this long-ish thread, "Google streams music at 320kbps High, 192kbps Normal, and 128kbps Low using the MP3 codec."

So it looks like you have 320kbps MP3s coming down the pipe. Hope this helps.

 

[Salseca]

Thanks a lot. I didn't think it was up there with Tidal or Spotify. Cheers

 

[Jorj]

Welcome! This is a great time to be getting into the hobby. We all love listening to music, first and foremost, but you'd have a hard time telling it the way we love carrying on about gear and all this science-stuff.

If you can reliably get your Google Music to stream at the highest bandwidth, then until you get a pretty serious set of headphones, you're good to go for a while. You may, and this is not at all certain, eventually get to the point where you hear the odd digital artifacts and ringing that comes from MP3 compression. The codecs are so good now (or my ears are degraded to the point) that I struggle with picking out 320 MP3 vs lossless FLAC. Honestly, if it were not for the fact that I'm a cheap-a$$ and buy used CD's off eBay so I can get the WHOLE album, I would not have the lossless library I do now, most likely. Oh, and if you were not aware, your Amazon Prime membership comes with a TON of free music, lots of classical and obscure jazz recordings @ 320 kbps. They push hard for you to jump to Prime Music, but don't do it! The amount of included music is huge.

 

[Salseca]

I appreciate the insight. Cheers brother!