I remember in my twenties discovering things in old music when I purchased my first good stereo. I have recently started to make new discoveries again with Hi-Res audio files and improving dacs with better headphones.
I remember in my twenties discovering things in old music when I purchased my first good stereo. I have recently started to make new discoveries again with Hi-Res audio files and improving dacs with better headphones.
So I found appreciation for Kendrick Lamar and Tyler the creator after getting a pair of audio technica m50x to go with my Scarlett 2i2. I always liked a few songs from each of them but on those headphones in flac the music is legitimately night and day. They don’t even sound like the same music. Especially in the case of Kendrick who loves to throw tons of interesting things in to his beats that 100% go unnoticed unless you have a good set of headphones.
Where it really makes a difference is in music that is very well produced but busy. A good example would be like the foo fighters. Typically to me they sound pretty meh due to the heavy use of crash cymbals. Compression of lesser quality formats just makes the fantastic guitar tones and everything else just meld into this kind of slop when you hear it in mp3. Seriously do a side by side on something like monkey wrench.
A huge album that I have rediscovered is the entire album cross by Justice. It’s just mp3 but even with the dac and headphones it makes it sound great vs in the car only being meh thanks to repetitive things being highlighted.
Tl;dr. Good headphones+dac+flac = makes 78% of music you have heard 1000 times gooder.
Tyler is in my backlog. I need to get around to checking them out. I agree about Kendricks music. I am an old rock head so I would usually just listen to hip hop on spotify or youtube because I always saw it as stripped down. Not layered like older rock. I put on TPAB one day at work with my dac and headphones. I kept stopping going “wait what?”