Music update! ; ) I was so blown away by the difference between MP3/AAC and FLAC streaming quality from that one good classical FLAC radio station I found ( http://amp.cesnet.cz:8000/cro-d-dur.flac public radio from Prague, it's in Czech) that I gave in and subbed to an HD audio streaming service. 'p'
I took trial subs to Idagio, Qobuz, and Tidal. Idagio's UI is a little flakier than the others, and its FLAC only goes up to 16-bit/44.1kHz, whereas Qobuz and Tidal go higher than that on a fair number of albums (seems to be the same on the various albums I checked), up to 24-bit/192kHz on some of them. Qobuz is a little more tuned to classical music—you can download the liner notes for some albums, for instance, which Tidal wasn't offering me, and I liked its presentation of and ease of access to album credits—and it shows right away what level of FLAC quality is available for a given album, whereas in Tidal it won't show you that until you start playing the album.
Oh yeah also Qobuz has a yearly subscription plan, which makes it less expensive than Tidal, which only has a monthly plan. Although speaking of pricing, I was naive and signed up for my 1-month trial through Google Play right in the Qobuz Android app—but when you do that you get locked into an inflated price due to Google taking their cut, so now I've gotta wait for the trial month to run out—I already cancelled it but you can't cancel it immediately, thanks Google 'p'—and then I'll go sub at the non-Google-inflated rate through Qobuz' web site (Tidal rather smartly doesn't give you the option to sub through their app/Google, you have to go to their web site to sign up).
So anyhoo now I can play pretty much any classical album whenever I want in FLAC, whoooo the power the power. There's a lot of peevishness online where people go on about the human ear not being able to distinguish between 16-bit and 24-bit audio and all, which I won't argue, but it's gonna most likely get downsampled through my LDAC wireless bluetooth headphone connection, and when resampling, the more data you start with, the better the resample, so I say, the more data the better, what do I have gig internet for now anyway? ; D Yeah justify these silly costs to yourself, yeah that's it. 'p' ... It just so happens that this evening is the evening my through-the-thin-ceiling neighbors decided to start playing music across their apartment though, and I tell you, Berlioz snuggled up on my ears and pumping through FLAC/LDAC (sounds like an evil robot eh) while scanning in today's A* page made that oh so much more bearable. ^ _^ (These 'phones have Active Noise Cancellation too but I get the dreaded psychosomatic "eardrum suck" from ANC's sudden muting of background noise so I gotta leave that off.)
~~~~~~~~~ The original 16" x 6.75" watercolor art for today's new A* page is up for auction on eBay. : )
