So, you’re tired of those $30 Skull Candy headphones that you bought from Walmart and you’ve been eying those high-quality $1,200 cans. You’re ready to take the plunge into the wonderful rabbit hole of audiophilia. But, don’t add those headphones to your cart just yet! Being an audiophile is much more than just buying the best gear. There are some things that you need to know before you make the investment into your headphones, DAC, pre-amp, amp, etc. So, here’s what you need to know before you spend a bunch of money on your audiophile gear.
This isn’t a guide to tell you how each device is going to work or tell you what devices to buy. The thing is that there are a bunch of things that people don’t know about the devices they already have. They don’t know how the Android operating system handles audio, what kind of signal the headphone jack on their computer pushes out, what streaming services actually deliver a high-quality signal, or other important things.
Being an audiophile is not a cheap affair, and getting the best of the best will cost you thousands. The equipment is expensive, but knowledge is priceless. Learning this before spending money will make your audiophile journey better.
What you should know before buying expensive audio equipment
Before you drop a bunch of money on expensive equipment, you need to know what about your devices that might be blocking you from actually getting quality audio.
Reading audio quality
This isn’t going to be a full “Audiophilia For Dummies” guide. However, here’s a quick glance over some of the terms used when referring to audio quality. These are Sample Rate, Bit Depth, and Bit Rate.
You’ve probably heard of some of these terms. If you haven’t seen the terms when studying audio, you’ve still seen them in the wild. If you look at an audio device, you’ve probably seen something like this: 24-bit/96kHz. That actually consists of the bit depth and sample rate. So, what do these mean?
Sample rate
Let’s start with one that’s a bit easier to grasp. For this, we’ll use an analogy; think of a music file as a digital image. The sample rate is like the “resolution” of the audio file. When a camera takes an image, the image sensor has a number of photosites (let’s just refer to them as pixels for this article) packed into a small space. The more pixels in the camera sensor, the higher resolution the image. Well, when a microphone records sound, it takes little samples of the audio thousands of times a second. Similar to pixels, the more samples taken per second, the higher quality the audio.
The sample rate is measured in kilohertz. So, looking at the example above (24-bit/96kHz), the sample rate there is the 96kHz. Just like how picture resolution has standards (480p, 720p, 1080p, and so on) sample rates also have standards: 44.1kHz, 48kHz, 88.2kHz, 96kHz, and 192kHz.
Also, just like picture quality, the higher up you go, the harder it will be to tell the difference in the audio quality. Much of the professionally recorded music you listen to is 44.1kHz. Even though this is a lower standard, it’s still plenty detailed. If you’re listening to high-quality music, you’re likely to run into 96kHz. Music with that sample rate is incredibly detailed. Don’t be fooled by the larger numbers; you don’t need the higher 192kHz to enjoy your music. It’s like looking at an 8K image and a 4K image on your phone screen. You won’t really tell the difference.
Bit depth
Next up, there’s the bit depth. In the example (24-bit/96kHz), that’s the first number. When talking about audio quality, you’ve probably heard terms like 16-bit, 24-bit, and 32-bit. It’s a bit tough to explain the science behind the bit depth in this explainer, but the gist of it is that the higher the bit depth, the less noise you hear in the audio.
Bit rate
This is something that can confuse many newcomers to the audiophile community. It’s easy to get bit rate confused with bit depth. There’s no complicated scientific explanation behind the bit rate. The bit rate is: (Bit Depth ✕ Sample Rate) ✕ Number of Tracks = Bit Rate.
So, going back to our 240-bit/96kHz example, you’d multiply the bit depth by the sample rate. After that, you’ll multiply that number by the number of tracks; this number is typically 2. The resulting number you’d get is 4,608. The bit rate is measured in kilobits per second. So, the bit rate is 4608kbps.
CD-quality
It’s important to know what these numbers mean. Again, you don’t really need to focus on bigger numbers. If you’re just starting your audiophile journey, you won’t really be able to tell the difference between 96kHz and 192kHz. In fact, a pretty popular standard in the audio industry is what’s called CD quality. As you can guess, it’s the typical audio quality you’d hear if you listen to a CD.
CD quality is 16-bit/44.1kHz. It’s a pretty standard quality of music that sounds nice. Think of it as the 1080p of audio quality. While it’s not the highest quality, it’s still very nice.
Your computer headphone jack
You know about audio quality, yes, but don’t buy those $1,200 headphones just yet! Chances are that you were planning on plugging them into your computer’s headphone jack. Well, here is another opportunity to learn about the audiophile life before spending money.
You can probably use a platform that can play music up to 32-bit/192kHz, but you probably won’t hear all of those samples and bits. Depending on the computer you have, your headphone jack might be locked to a certain audio quality. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how good your headphones are, you won’t hear anything higher than what your headphone jack is pushing.
If you’re using a Windows computer, you’ll want to go to your Control Panel, click the Hardware and Sound section, and click on the Manage Audio Devices button. This will bring up a little window with all of your audio devices. It will include all of the Bluetooth devices you’ve connected.
The audio driver that pushes the audio through your headphone jack will show up. If you use a Windows computer, there’s a chance that yours is called “Realtek”. Make sure it’s classified as “Headphone” and not “Speaker.”
Double-click on it. Another little window will pop up. Click on the Advanced tab. This screen will let you choose the default audio quality. Chances are that it tops out at 24-bit/48kHz. Click on the dropdown at the top of the screen to choose the audio quality.
Look into getting a portable external DAC
So, your computer might not be injecting your ears with the best audio quality. That’s a shame, but there’s a way around this. The thing is that your computer has a built-in DAC (the DAC is the device that converts the digital binary signal into an electrical signal to be converted into sound waves by your speaker/headphones).
An external DAC will connect to your computer via the USB port. It will act as the middleman between your computer and your headphones. Rather than sending the digital signal to your computer’s integrated DAC, it will send it through the USB port to your external DAC.
As with most products, you’ll get higher quality DACs the higher you go in price. However, this article is all about getting you ready for the audiophile life BEFORE spending a ton of money. You’re able to find some portable DACs for as low as $80. Since DACs are fundamentally designed to be higher quality than your computer’s, if you go for an affordable DAC, chances are that it will deliver better audio than your computer’s DAC.
A good DAC to look into is the HELM Audio Bolt DAC. It’s a DAC and AMP all in one, and it only costs about $83. There are some DACs out there that will cost an arm and a leg (and maybe every one of your teeth), but don’t shoot for the stars just yet. Get a cheaper DAC to listen for the difference in audio quality.
Just like how you checked the audio quality of your computer’s headphone jack, you can go to your Control Panel, go to the sound settings, select the new DAC, and adjust the audio quality.
Streaming service audio quality
Before you drop your child’s college fund on a fancy audio setup, how about spending $15/month on a streaming service that can utilize the setup’s hardware? The fact of the matter is that many of your favorite streaming services don’t actually stream high-quality.
Are you a YouTube Music or Spotify listener? Well, these services don’t actually stream high-quality music. At the time of writing this article, Spotify is working on bringing a high-quality audio payment tier called “Supremium,” but it’s not out yet.
So, it’s important to know which services actually offer high-quality audio.
Tidal
A good example is Tidal. This is a pretty popular streaming service with more than 110 million titles and counting. It should have pretty much whatever you’re looking for. It offers music at up to 24-bit/192kHz. Also, you’re able to download music files.
- Individual plan: $10.99/month ($12.99/month on mobile)
- Family plan: $16.99/month ($19.99/month on mobile)
- Student plan: $4.99/month (will increase to $5.49/month on August 19th, 2024)
Amazon Music HD
Amazon has offered a music streaming service for years, and the company lets you stream music at up to 24-bit/192kHz. It’s important that not all of the files are this high-quality. The aforementioned audio quality refers to its Ultra-HD audio files. The platform also has HD files which are CD quality and standard files which are compressed.
- Individual plan: $10.99/month ($9.99/month for Prime members)
- Family plan: $16.99/month
- Student plan: $5.99/month
QOBUZ
This service isn’t quite as well-known as Tidal, but it’s still a compelling platform. Just like the other services, it offers audio at up to 24-bit/192kHz. QOBUZ offers 100 million tracks and 500,000 albums to listen to.
- Solo: $12.99/month ($129.99/year)
- Duo (2-person plan): $17.99/month ($179.99/year)
- Family: $21.99/month: ($215.99/year)
Android’s audio limitation
If you’re an Apple iPhone user, good for you! You can enjoy high-quality audio. If you’re an Android user, we’ve got bad news. There’s a pretty annoying limitation that Android users have to deal with.
iPhones can push an audio signal as high as 192kHz to your headphones. This means that it doesn’t matter what streaming services you listen to, you’ll hear the audio at the highest quality it offers.
Over in Android land, things aren’t as sunny. A notorious system limitation sees the audio capped at 48kHz. So, all of the audio you hear is capped at a quarter of that of an iPhone. That $1,200 pair of headphones won’t really be pushing high-quality audio to your ears.
What makes this worse is that there are some music streaming services that don’t get around this limitation. So, a music streaming service can stream audio at 192kHz to your phone, but your phone will down-sample it to 48kHz before it makes it to your ears.
However, that’s not true for all of the streaming services. There are some exceptions. Tidal and QOBUZ actually get past the limitation. YouTube Music, Spotify, And Amazon HD don’t. So, if you’re shopping for a high-quality streaming service, then you’ll want to think about those two.
Lossless vs. Lossy audio files
Perhaps you want to listen to files locally available on your device. Well, a decent set of headphones might make your audio files sound a bit better, but you’re not going to get much better audio quality if your audio files have been squashed.
If you’ve been around audiophile lingo, you’ve probably heard of the terms “lossy” and “lossless”. Chances are that you have a ton of MP3 files on your computer or phone. Sorry to burst your bubble, but MP3 is a lossy format. A lossy file is one that’s been compressed. Just enough data in the file has been removed to keep the file size down without affecting the audio quality too much.
However, a lossless file is one that retains all of the original audio data. So, if you’re listening to a file in a lossless format like FLAC, you’ll hear all of the details present in the original mix.
Why are MP3s compressed? Well, MP3s are the Jpegs of the audio world. Jpegs are compressed to keep the size down. This makes them efficient for sharing online and storing on devices with limited storage. The MP3 player came about in the late 90s, and digital storage devices weren’t quite like today with hundreds of gigabytes. This is why MP3 files are so small.
This efficiency comes at a price; MP3 files aren’t as high-quality as other formats. So, before you buy expensive gear, you’ll need to find a good source of lossless files. Streaming services like Tidal, QOBUZ, and Amazon Music stream FLAC files, so they’re a great source to hear uncompressed music.
If you’re into buying and downloading music, make sure you check the format you’re downloading. If there’s an option to download a FLAC, WAV, or MQA (there are plenty more formats, but these are some of the most popular lossless formats), you should choose it. These files will take up more space, but they’ll be worth it if you want the highest quality.
Learn the issue with Bluetooth audio
Historically, audiophiles have had something against Bluetooth audio. Why is that? Well, just like how MP3 files are compressed, Bluetooth audio is compressed. Bluetooth has a pretty limited bandwidth, so a limited amount of data can actually be sent to your device over the air. So, the audio you’re hearing isn’t as high-quality as audio through a wired connection.
In 2024, Bluetooth audio is much better than just a few years ago. This is because of the high-quality codecs that are available. Simply put, the codec is the technology that compresses and decompresses the audio signal. The signal is compressed on your device and prepped to be sent over the air to your headphones. Then the codec in your headphones decompresses the information and converts it to an electrical signal to be sent to your audio drivers.
The audio codec that decompresses the audio can dictate the final quality. If your device compresses a 96kHz file, but your headphones’ codec can only decompress back to 44.1kHz, then you’re not hearing the best audio quality. Lucky for budding audiophiles, Bluetooth technology has improved over the years and the codecs decompressing the audio have gotten better.
For example, Qualcomm’s aptX Lossless codec can offer audio quality up to 16-bit/44.1kHz lossless. So, you’ll be able to listen to CD-quality music with no compression. It also offers 24-bit/kHz lossy quality. You’ll be hearing music of that quality, but some of the information will be compressed.
So, Bluetooth audio still has a ways to go, but companies are working on improving it. Hopefully, Bluetooth headphones will be as good as wired headphones down the road.
All in all
If you’re planning on scooping up a bunch of devices to improve the quality of your music, no one can stop you (other than debt collectors). While it’s nice having that $2,000 pair of Sennheiser headphones, and while they will sound superb, it’s still important to know about the devices you already have, the streaming services that are out, and the music going into your ears before you start spending money. This knowledge will steer you in the right direction to being an audiophile.
