Gather round chilluns

1) Your bluetooth connection is shit. If you are using it in any capacity, you have no use for high definition/lossless audio.

2) Audio equipment has been designed around your shitty streams for the past 20 years. I have a crap pair of $40 Sony earbuds from 1996. They sound objectively better than everything up to a $100 pair of Shure SE215s.

3) Outside of a pure environment, you can't hear the difference anyway. I have a $1000 Onkyo receiver playing through $1000 worth of Infinity Kappa. You can't even hear the difference between Bluetooth and direct connection in the living room.

4) The connection matters. I have a $6000 set of Genelecs playing through a $2000 Tascam surround controller. If I play lossless Tidal through the analog out of my Mac Mini into that controller, it sounds distinctly worse than lossless Tidal through the $600 DAC into said-same controller at 24/44.1 (streaming services eat shit if you force them to run at 48.) However, listening to a lossy 320kHz Mixcloud DJ mix also sounds worse through the analog pathway.

5) You probably can't tell the difference even in a perfect environment. I've been a professional listener since 1996. If your formative music years happened after Napster, there's good odds you've never been exposed to anything good. Unless you think music recording quality has drastically improved since 2005 or so (it has), you can't hear what you'd be missing anyway:

For listeners like Marlene Flaton, a hair stylist and musician in New York who loves the convenience of having Apple’s catalog at her fingertips—not to mention the 4,000 songs saved on her phone—access to hi-res is a welcome development. When she listens to Emmylou Harris’s “Luxury Liner,” or Bruce Springsteen’s “Nebraska,” she says that, “as a musician, I want to hear all the different nuances. If there’s some way that I’ll be able to hear those better, without always having to pull out my vinyl, I’d like to do that.”

About that Nebraska album...

In an interview with Rolling Stone, Springsteen said, "I was just doing songs for the next rock album, and I decided that what always took me so long in the studio was the writing. I would get in there, and I just wouldn't have the material written, or it wasn't written well enough, and so I'd record for a month, get a couple of things, go home write some more, record for another month—it wasn't very efficient. So this time, I got a little Teac four-track cassette machine, and I said, I'm gonna record these songs, and if they sound good with just me doin' 'em, then I'll teach 'em to the band. I could sing and play the guitar, and then I had two tracks to do somethin' else, like overdub a guitar or add a harmony. It was just gonna be a demo. Then I had a little Echoplex that I mixed through, and that was it. And that was the tape that became the record. It's amazing that it got there, 'cause I was carryin' that cassette around with me in my pocket without a case for a couple of weeks, just draggin' it around. Finally, we realized, 'Uh-oh, that's the album.' Technically, it was difficult to get it on a disc. The stuff was recorded so strangely, the needle would read a lot of distortion and wouldn't track in the wax. We almost had to release it as a cassette." Another problem arose during mastering of the tapes because of low recording volume, but that was resolved with sophisticated noise reduction techniques.

THAT SAID

I made the dire mistake of (1) trying out a pair of SE215s and (2) recognizing their superiority over any headphone or earbud made in the past 20 years and trying out Tidal. That led to a Tidal subscription and a modded pair of SE846s with brain slugs. So... once you hear it, you can't unhear it.

But "hearing it" will cost you at least a $100 pair of headphones, hard-wired into your phone. If you own a pair of earpods, or want to own a pair of earpods, or have anything that looks like an earpod, you can skip it. I bought some Aonics just because they have mics on them that allow you to hear the world around you and yeah - there's a difference between 846s plugged into bluetooth and 215s plugged into bluetooth but it's substantially less profound than just skipping the bluetooth entirely.