Once You Go Lossless, There's No Return

Let’s be honest. Most of us have been lied to. Our Spotify quality of Very High settings or our Bluetooth earphones at ₹1999 have been making us believe that we received the whole experience. I believed that as well, but then I did sit down with some real, genuine lossless source and a good pair of wired iems.

It is not only about "improved quality". It is as though you have been wearing a pair of clouded lens your entire life -and suddenly everything comes into focus.
And after you see it, you can never see like not.

THE COMPRESSION SCAM

Standard streaming is built on a lie: that your brain won't miss what the algorithm throws away. Instead, they refer to it as perceptual coding, which merely translates to half the music being removed so as to save on server expenses.

When you switch to FLAC, you're finally getting what the artist actually made in the studio. You begin to notice the little things--the vibration of a string of a guitar when it is plucked, or the echo of the room. It is the variation between seeing a picture of food and having a bite of it.

IT'S A DANGEROUS RABBIT HOLE

I'll admit, my setup isn't crazy expensive, but the chain matters. I got a decent pair of IEMs, a clean DAC, and started using bit-perfect playback.

The "mush" vanished suddenly. Everything in a lossy stream sounds flat, as though the drums, vocals and bass are competing to occupy the same 2D space. However, with a good lossless system, there is a 3D stage. You are able to indicate the area where the snare is striking and taste the air surrounding the vocals. It is addictive and gives my old playlists a new life.

THE CURSE OF THE 'GOLDEN EAR'

Here’s the catch: it ruins everything else.

I used to be able to listen to background music without straining, but I can no longer do so. My brain has been trained to be aware of those anomalous compression artifacts, that metallic, shimmery sound on the high notes and the loss of definition in the bass. Coming back to 320kbps MP3 now seems like a 4K movie on a vintage tube television. It’s painful.

WHY IT ACTUALLY MATTERS

It is known as elitism or what the people refer to as audiophile bakchodi to me but all I ask is respect. When it took a million-dollar studio to get an artist to work on the frequency of every single note in perfect harmony, the least that I can do is to listen to it without a billion-dollar technology company slicing it up to fit.

Is it more work? Yeah. Cables are also a nightmare and local files occupy space. However, that one occasion when a song actually sends you goose bumps due to its sound being so "life-like"?

It’s worth every single bit.

Got a gear recommendation or a track that sounds insane in FLAC? Hit me up. My ears are always open.