The Hi-Res audio quality debate has a version that deserves calling out upfront: a lot of it is snake oil. I’m looking at you, Mr $1000 speaker cable guy. The claim that 24-bit/192kHz audio sounds better than 16-bit/44.1kHz CD-quality has been tested extensively in blind listening trials, and most people including experienced listeners can’t reliably tell the difference. The Nyquist-Shannon theorem is real. Human hearing tops out around 20kHz, and capturing frequencies above that range doesn’t make music sound better for the vast majority of people. The studies largely back that up. I’m not going to argue the feeling in my tum tum like some audiophiles do.

So if you came here expecting confirmation bias, you’re out of luck. Why would a guy that makes an audiophile geared app make this post? Well because the full story is more interesting!

There Is More to the Snake Oil Argument

Most “hi-res audio is a scam” articles attack the codec and sample rate debate. 16-bit vs 24-bit, 44.1kHz vs 96kHz. On that narrow question, the skeptics have a point from a purely A/B listening perspective. Mixing is a different story, but that’s another post. The bigger issue is that skeptics are answering a different question than the one that actually matters for people who own disc collections.

The more interesting question isn’t whether 96kHz sounds better than 44.1kHz. It’s: which master did you get?

When a label releases an album on SACD, DVD-Audio (before it died), or Blu-ray Audio, they typically go back to the original analog tapes or the original analog transfer where possible. They work with mixing and mastering engineers whose brief is to do justice to the format. Steven Wilson has done some exceptional modern Atmos mixes and is a great example of this. That means preserving dynamic range rather than squashing everything for loudness. It’s a genuinely different creative decision than the mastering that ended up on streaming for a lot of albums.

Streaming versions of catalog titles often came from a different mastering session entirely. Frequently a CD remaster from the 90s or 2000s where the brief was “make it louder.” That master got uploaded and has been there ever since.

The result is that the SACD of a 1970s rock record can sound audibly different from the streaming version of the same album. Not because of the sample rate. A different and more careful mastering decision drives that gap, and it’s audible even on more modest equipment.

The Loudness War and Why Streaming vs Disc Audio Quality Actually Differs

As a mixing engineer myself I know that from roughly the mid-90s through the 2010s, albums were mastered progressively louder. Louder sounds better in a brief A/B comparison to most humans. Untrained listeners given the choice of two tracks will pick the louder one almost every time. Human hearing isn’t equally sensitive across all frequencies, and radio and retail both rewarded loudness. The technical mechanism was heavy compression and limiting, which raises the average level while squashing dynamic peaks.

The audible effect is a loss of punch. A snare that should crack just sits at a constant level. Bass that should throb buzzes along with everything else at the same volume. It’s tiring to listen to for long stretches, even if you can’t immediately name why.

Many classic albums landed on SACD and DVD-Audio independent of that cycle, preserved with older and more dynamic masters. Some got re-released specifically because audiophiles pushed back on the louder remasters. The disc on your shelf might contain a version that genuinely doesn’t exist anywhere on streaming. Not because of its resolution, but because of when and how engineers mastered it. This is the real streaming vs disc audio quality gap that doesn’t get much attention.

Then There’s Atmos, Which Is a Different Argument Entirely

Here’s where the “hi-res is snake oil” framing breaks down completely, at least for me personally. Lossless Dolby Atmos on a Blu-ray music disc isn’t primarily about resolution. It places sound in three-dimensional space around you, including above you if you have ceiling or upward-firing speakers (don’t recommend the latter). That’s not a subtle audiophile difference. It’s a fundamentally different way of experiencing music, and it either works or it doesn’t based on whether you can hear sound coming from different places.

Take Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon in Atmos, a live concert recording, or an orchestral performance. A well-mixed Atmos version puts you inside the recording rather than in front of it. The violins sit to your left. The brass section comes from behind you. Ambience and room sound arrive from above. None of that has anything to do with sample rate debates. With the right setup, it genuinely transports you somewhere else.

That experience doesn’t require golden ears or belief in frequencies above human hearing. It requires speakers, which is where the honest caveat comes in.

The Real Barrier Is the System, Not the Ears

True Atmos needs more than two speakers. Even a basic 5.1 setup gets you surround sound but not height. For proper Atmos you need at least a couple of ceiling-mounted speakers, ideally four, on top of your existing surround setup. Add a capable AVR to decode and drive them, plus cables, mounting, and calibration. Skip the upward-firing Atmos speakers in this author’s opinion. They’re a gimmick.

That’s a real cost and a real commitment. For someone in an apartment, with a living room that can’t accommodate speaker placement, or who simply doesn’t want to deal with the setup, Atmos on Blu-ray is irrelevant regardless of how good it sounds. The format’s benefits depend entirely on hardware that not everyone has, wants, or can afford. That’s a completely valid position.

Streaming lossy Atmos exists partly to meet people where they are. A spatially processed Atmos mix through headphones or a soundbar requires none of that setup, which is a genuine convenience. But streaming Atmos runs on Dolby Digital Plus, a lossy codec at a fraction of the bitrate of a Blu-ray disc. The spatial processing also works differently from actual object-based playback through discrete speakers. It’s closer in spirit to headphone virtualisation than to what an AVR does with real height channels. This is also a gimmick.

A Few Albums Worth Checking

If you want to hear the mastering difference for yourself, these are releases where the disc version stands well above what streaming offers:

• Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here in Atmos — the earlier stereo masters also have significantly more dynamic range than the louder remasters on streaming
• Steely Dan Aja — original analog transfers that ignores the loudness remaster cycle entirely
• Early 2000s jazz SACDs — Blue Note, Columbia, and Verve releases made specifically for audiophiles, with careful mastering that nobody has touched since

In each case the point isn’t that SACD offers higher resolution. A different and more careful mastering decision went into those releases, and that decision is audible.

What This Means Practically

If you listen mostly on headphones or a Bluetooth speaker, none of this is relevant to you and that’s completely fine. A decent stereo setup with no surround sound makes the mastering argument real but the Atmos argument moot. A home theater setup with height channels and an Atmos-capable AVR means you probably already know most of this. The question is just whether you’re getting the best audio off the discs you already own.

That last group is who Lossless Extract is built for. The disc holds the uncompressed, bit-perfect audio as mixed in the studio. One drag gets it into a playable, properly tagged file your media server can bitstream directly to your AVR. The rest of the chain, speakers, room, AVR, you’ve already sorted.

The snake oil criticism holds for the bit-depth and sample rate debate. The mastering argument holds at any quality level. The immersion argument holds for anyone with the speakers to hear it. Every non-audiophile I’ve let sit in front of some of these Atmos discs in a proper 7.2.4 setup has been blown away, and most of them couldn’t tell an MP3 from 24-bit/192kHz if their life depended on it.