I've heard this argument so many times - but personally I can trivially easily here the difference between Tidal / Apple Music and Spotify's 'high quality' setting - even on wireless headphones. Music on spotify sounds flat and drained. No idea if this has something to do with their compression technique, some kind of EQing, or a flaw in some other part of the pipeline, but I've blind tested it many times and its night and day.
Generally the problem with this type of argument is that the two sources are not volume-matched. Try out an ABX test here, of lossless vs various lossy codecs: https://abx.digitalfeed.net/
I used to be like you many years ago, thinking that high samplerates and bit depth were essential and the ultimate way of getting the best possible sound quality, but in reality 44.1khz 16bit is plenty for humans. Get over it. Whoever mixed the 192khz version essentially remastered it and put a bit of a spice over it. You can easily prove it by producing a downmixed 44khz version (use a high quality resampler) from the 192khz version and trying to blind ABX both, I doubt you will be able to spot any difference, and if you do, congratulations your sound system has some weird intermodulation issue from the high frequencies present in the high sample rate version, that is causing a listenable sound to appear (which should not be there).
I think you're missing the wood for the trees here. It makes no functional difference to the listener whether the reason spotify sounds worse is their use of lower quality masters, or some aspect of their streaming or compression. In practice their library sounds significantly, measurably worse to many people. I've also blind tested this with friends when I signed up for Tidal, and most people I tested were able to clearly hear the difference.
This. No double-blind ABX test has ever been able to discern the difference between an above-CD quality file and its downsampled CD-quality equivalent, or even a 320 kbps MP3 encoding of it.
Most people are not listening closely, nearly meditating over music. If you average over most people, this is what you will find. Look at the "outliers" in those same studies.
It seems more like you need to get over it. I have never cared about bit rates etc. I just care about how it sounds and I know that lossless sounds significantly better to me and to many others.
The amount of gaslighting when it comes to audio is always bizarre to me.
Read my post again, I'm strictly talking about the audio format and not about the codec nor compression. I would expect anyone caring enough to compare CD quality 44khz and 192khz/24bits to be using lossless or uncompressed audio, otherwise what's the point? Pretty much all lossy codecs will put a low-pass filter and trow out any sound above 16khz~20khz anyway, and some will even resample to 48khz, no matter what lol.
I can't speak to Apple Music or Tidal, but I did a test between the Spotify and CD versions of Xtal from Selected Ambient Works 85-92 by Aphex Twin and the difference would be clear to absolutely anyone - the Spotify version is very tinny.
People often trot out the "most people can't tell the difference" argument, but I wonder how many of those people have actually tried a variety of tests? My hunch is very few.
Are you sure you are not comparing a normal release to the remastered version? There are plenty of albums out there that have "improved" or remastered versions but are not labelled as such in the album title, and Selected Ambient Works 85-92 is one of those.
Xtal is a gem. I just tested both and the Apple Music version had more oomph the first time I tested for a bit. Then I went back to the beginning a second time and they sounded the same. Whether or not it's true I don't think I can trust myself to be a good tester.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Fwiw I believe Xtal was originally made from samples recorded on cassette, so there's definitely a ceiling on how dynamic it could sound.
