With all the hyperbolic reviews of gear, I find it hard sometimes to quantify how important various components of a hifi setup are to achieving the best sound possible.
What do you spend the bulk of your budget on, and what can you get away with skimping on until you’ve got extra cash lying around, to get those diminishing returns on the last few % of upgrade for your rig?
I can’t comment on Spotify or other streaming service, since there no way to verify the sound quality. If I have CD or sound file, I can at least verify the numbers.
Talking about numbers and formats, I can’t tell difference between MP3 192kbit and FLAC (source file).
Spotify VBR => Corda Stack => HD800.
I can only tell the difference on songs that I’ve extremely familiar with and am specifically looking for rather than general listening. So I don’t think it matters in a meaningful way once you hit a well encoded VBR. The specific characteristics are probably more exacerbated at 192kbit (and 128kbit), but I don’t I would be able to do it in a statistically significant way on unknown tracks for 192kbit either.
Maybe I stand a chance at 128kbit.
I can tell between mp3 and FLAC on my nicest studio monitors, but even then, its not a big difference.