What are some of the best purchases of your life?

erik111189@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 574 points –

For me it has to be:

  1. Helix mattress ($1,217). Sleep is great.
  2. Home gym power cage & weights (~$1,000). Look good, feel good, get strong.
  3. Netgear Nighthawk AXE7800 ($339). No more random, annoying internet disconnects/slowness.
  4. Books ($0 @ library)
    • "Ultralearning" - Scott Young (how to learn efficiently)
    • "Enlightenment Now" - Steven Pinker (the world overall is improving)
    • "The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing" - Taylor Larimore (how to invest)
  5. PS5 ($500). So many great games like witcher 3, god of war, spiderman.

I'm searching for some more deep value purchases. Give me what you've got.

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I was wondering if investing in high quality headphones would be beneficial considering I mainly listen to streaming services music over Bluetooth. Given that Bluetooth can reduce audio quality due to its compression, and the streaming services applying their own compression are those high end headphones completely wasted on me?

It's a good question. Probably? I use Deezer, which is lossless (and my own collection), but when I listened to mp3s, I could tell the difference between good ones and bad ones. I would see if you can find a place that allows testing of headphones, because as much as I love these ones, it really is a tone question. Find something you like. There may be online services in your country that allow test and reture too. Just avoid paying $60,000 for one. That's too much.

Excellent question! The standardization for BT sucks. It's vague at best and misleading at worst.

When you go BT headphones or earbud shopping, you want a headset that supports either:

  1. Bluetooth aptX HD. This is the newer standard for quality and allows for higher bitrate over BT.
  2. LDAC. Also supports higher bitrates. AptX HD is more common so look for that more.

If you configure Bluetooth to use LDAC with max bandwidth it shouldn't reduce audio quality in a noticeable way unless you have incredible ears and know what to listen for. I use Spotify set to 320kb with normalization disabled sent via LDAC to a Qudelix 5K, high end headphones are 100% worth it. Or that depends on how you define high end, my most expensive are a set of $1500 IEMs and I wouldn't spend more than that because there's major diminishing returns as the price goes up.

Not at all.

The effect of audio compression on perceivable sound quality is greatly exaggerated. Most people can't tell the difference between >256kbps lossy and lossless in a blind test, even with TOTL headphones.