My housemate recently got a record player. She’s a big Swiftie and wanted to pick up her vinyls, ahead of the release of Dead Poet’s Society. This record player is pretty interesting, it can connect out via some wires or, as is expected in this day and age, a bluetooth connection. So naturally, I got a soundbar for the premium movie experience, which also has a bluetooth connection. It was a match made in heaven – everything sounded really good out of the soundbar, all the crackles were present but the voices were crisp, it was, in all honesty, a really great music listening experience. Would it be my go to? Probably not. Like most people, I prefer the ease of having a huge amount of music through Spotify on my phone, and while the record player does sound nice, I’m actually not a huge audio snob. There’s a time and place for really good audio setups, but I also believe listening in any capacity is better than no listening at all, and the sad fact is that most people are going to listen to music on sub-par devices.

Should you make your music sound better? In almost every case, the answer is yes! If you are able to increase the quality of your music listening experience, then you will hear more things that the artist intended. For example, if you listen to a really compressed song on bad earphones, you might miss the subtleties of the fingers moving up a guitar string. In many classical recordings, you can hear the breath of the musicians as they “breathe in” before playing a difficult measure or to signal the start of a movement. The more you are able to improve your listening experience, the more of these little things you will pick up.

So, how can you make your music sound better? The first way is to increase the actual quality of the audio you are listening to. Vinyl is famous because it is “lossless”. This means that there is no compression to the audio – what you hear on vinyl is the same thing that got recorded. In contrast, what you hear on an mp3, for instance, is the original recording, converted to a sequence of 1s and 0s, and some of those 1s and 0s have been reduced to preserve space. There’s a lot of computer science at play with this, but the simple version is that a compressed file is like having text speak for your music – instead of the musical equivalent of “I’ll be there in ten minutes”, you get “b there in 10”. It’s the same sentence, same meaning – but you’ve lost some of the nuance. There are some lossless audio streaming services now (TIDAL was famous for this when it first came out), but even Apple has a high quality mode to its streams. Find your quality setting in your music app and change it to the highest quality it offers. Spotify, although behind other companies in this, also has a higher quality mode which is not lossless but still better than the default. Do note though that this will increase your data usage or file size for downloaded music. Some services let you pick between modes, so if you are out streaming on data, instead of wi-fi, you will get the lower quality version over the high quality version. Secondly, a better pair of earphones or headphones will go a long way. Most earphones in the “couple hundred dollars” range (e.g. airpods) are going to be alright, this is more directed at you if you are using K-Mart’s $2 wired earphones. Those two changes will make your music just that little bit nicer, and you may start hearing new things. If you do, let me know what changes you noticed in your songs in the comments below!