EDX Pro

The OP approach was pretty terrible too. He is trying to compare a value based entry level product, with a cheap DSP cable, to the Nothing Ear 2024 TWS, which is a target curve DSP Tuned 11mm driver, and is probably more in line with a $50-75 single DD IEM, like the Singolo or the Cadenza II. When you make sweeping emphatic statements based off of an entey level product, you lose the plot entirely. It would be like saying "US Sports Cars Suck, and the Corvette is a joke!" And then put in the body of the post "So I have a Chevy Spark Rental Car, but when I went back to GR Corolla, it was way better." Yeah, no shit...

As long as you are attenuating your ears with something, a little goes a long way. I used to be a big Electronic Music Festival guy, and unsoundbags wear earplugs under my beanie. I could hear everything and everyone just fine. And there was plenty of bass to feel, that I didn't need my ears wrecked from it. Interesting enough, my left ear has a similar odd spot around 2k, and as I get older, I find i am more sensitive to sibilance around 6k. Which I never was before. I don't know if that is just a perception/pallette change, or what?? But I find it interesting all the same. And it's kinda fun to track it, having been an audio nerd for so long, and reading up on audiology and hearing loss. So, I have had a half dozen people do ABX testing with me. Twlling me there is no audible difference in things. Specifically in Lossy Encoding, and in DAC Filtering. I have around a 90% success rate with all of the on-line tests I have done, I genuinely don't find them that difficult. When doing the live ABX testing with friends, and we are simply testing which is the highest bit rate, it's pretty easy again. They didn't like that I was picking it out. So they changed it to "well, what bit rate is it then?" And it became "see you can't tell", well, I CAN tell which is better, and usually always tell which is the lossless master, but being exact on which bitrate it is, is a little absurd. Same with DAC Filtering and Non Oversampling. I can tell if the sampling is the same or different. I can generally tell when it's in NOS, but then the goal post gets moved again to "well, which filter is it?!" That's almost impossible to tell just by ear. But I can tell if it's the same or different. Where it gets difficult is if it's a well mastered track with proper headroom, and it is a quiet passage, where there isn't a lot going on, and the encoder has room to make the best use of the available bitrate. And it's really really damn close, even to the lossless master. About the only way you can tell is if there is a sharp metallic sound like a triangle or a cymbal, or it leads in to some kind of swell. Then you can hear the encoder steuggle to compensate for the sudden increase in information. Every Lossy Encoder has tow work within guardrails of its capability. When it comes to 24bit audio or DSD, there is a lot of available headroom. And things have a tendency to ring out more, and decay more naturally. When you clamp that upper frequency response, it's going to run out of usable bit depth, and it just does what it can. And you get that watery shimmer to them as they decay. Thanks things like VBR can help, and better encoding parameters can make a bit of difference. But when you have really busy tracks, and limited bit depth to work with, a lot of those sounds just all get mashed together. That mashing together makes any kind of dynamic range in the track disappear. Everything becomes a two dimensional smear. It's like taking a 24bit PNG, and converting it to an 8bit GIF, ita gonna have a lot of banding, and any detail that was there, is going to be washed out, because the subtleties are gone. And just like there is a wide range of JPG encoding options, there is a massive range of MP3 encoder options as well. And how they are set up makes a difference. And back in the day, we would do it on a per album basis, because of how the album was mastered, and where in the FR the majority of the sound is coming from. Instead of just using generic default settings. Most of those default settings do mess with the loudness, and have some mild form of normalization, because it allows for the encoder to use less bits for dynamoc range and more for data. And with more people using TWS in transparency mode, this is acceptable, so many do it. So when you are on Amazon or iTunes, or Tidal, and you select reduced quality tracks, they sound different. So, yeah.. Anyway. Hopefully you can see this isn't really something I care to argue over, it is what it is. If lower quality works for you, then, great... Listen to what makes you happy.

Except... They do. Because the lack of dynamic range is the easiest way that I can tell. Compressed music sounds flat. The higher the compression level, the more 2 dimensional the sound gets. It's like the old Loudness War days. Lossy algorithms have a tendency to boost everything up, so there is less heavy lifting when compressing. Now, things like VBR can go a long way to making this less obvious, by giving more space for that dynamoc range. And some encoders like OGG Vorbis are very good at managing dynamoc range. But even still, they all focus on removing excess data. So a lot of harmonics and dynamoc interactions of instruments are not allowed to fully "ring out", and become clamped sounding, and flat. Like I have said elsewhere, you are literally taking data away from the audio, and once it's gone, you can't magically bring it back. Instrumentation is a lot of harmonics and overtones, and much of that exists in the range that lossy codecs compress. For most people who don't know better, and use compressed Blue Tooth for their listening, yeah, it's fine. But once your library is mostly lossless, and you are intimately familiar with your music, the moment you hear it compressed, it stands out. Even in my car (which is capable of 24/48 over BT), I can tell when Tidal or Amazon has data issues, and drops the quality from UHD, to HD, to Lossy Compressed. Even though a compressed medium like BT, in a shitty playback like a car stereo.

For sure, there are ways around all of this. The fact is, most don't. I specifically bring up Parachutes, because you can look at the physical media, and perceive these differences. At the end of the day, that's down to who masters the track, and in this case, it was done very poorly. You CAN get close to the 24bit master in a lossy format, but you have to play with a lot of parameters to get it to work right. And, frankly, most streaming services and studios, don't care. One of the other really big issues that bothers me with this, is that there are often multiple revisions of the UHD mastering. This is particularly bad with classic rock. I genuinely go out of my way to find and save the original recording versions of those albums, because some of the UHD mixes are absolute garbage. Real "try hard" level stuff. And in those cases, it's painfully obvious which version you're listening to. And I would rather have the lower quality original, than an over sanitized remix of a classic that didn't need mucking with. But I digress... Lossy tracks just stand out to me. I don't dislike them, I use them all the time. I have several utility DAPs, and I specifically go for quantity over quality, especially for gym or yard work, where I am wearing cheap BT Earbuds anyway, and it really doesn't matter. Because there is enough ambient noise that there is no such thing as "critical listening." But for everything else, it has to be lossless. To me there is, and always will be, an audible difference.