They are getting better. 13 is releasing on my Xperia now.
Additionally, its to the point where it doesn’t really matter. They do a lot of tweaking to android to support their hardware - which is pretty superior when it comes to audio.
To me that’s pretty bad. I’ve had Android 13 since August (in stable) and there were public beta’s for long before that. They should have been working on their customizations during the beta cycle. Releasing in late September would be reasonable, not late December.
The Pixel 6A is a good choice and is low cost (often around £300 in the UK)
It won a lot of praise on the MKBHD camera shootout, which for the price is excellent
Works really well with ARC for me with a dongle DAC
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What makes a discriminating listener that would favor this or that hardware or software for music listening ?
Exposure to natural acoustic sounds and music is the first most important thing, and exposure to high quality recorded music the second, for constructing not a good « sensory ear », rather a really discriminating « biological neural network » to interface with the sensory part. It stems from a long training indeed, that starts but does not end, by far, in childhood.
It seems clear to me that this is the key, as the sophistication and practical discriminating performance of hearing, varies hugely between a well trained and a poorly trained person, far beyond variations in raw audition curves between individuals and in a way that cannot be explained by it.
Today’s world is far more populated than say 50 years ago and noise sources everywhere, with more people living in densely populated areas, far less exposed to nature and natural sounds than to artificial ones.
About exposure to high quality recorded music, it starts but does not end with low compression input. Just investigate about the evolution of the compression rate of popular music recordings over the years. See for instance: Why is Modern Music so Awful? - YouTube
Then compression and distorsion also arise from listening to music in degraded conditions such as noisy places, with limited electronics and speakers, Music is everywhere, for everyone, but with which real quality ?
Another cause for degradation of hearing that has become more commonplace over the years, is the massive confusion between quality and quantity in amplified music that creates wrong listening habits and harms the hearing of people with regular exposure to loud music. The availability of cheap high power amplification has not been unambiguously positive in this regard.
I think this clarifies factors at play in this generational issue or question.
Regards,
CD
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Thanks
I did this so I hope to train my kids not to do it, the first quote from your post it might be very useful
Thanks
Traian
I do agree, but it’s not just the young who are addicted to amplitude 
Louder is better, David.On this planet anyways.
-Jerry Garcia to David Grisman (pizza tapes)
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Hey, 1988 here 
.
I love a high dynamic range in an audio system and this starts with micro dynamics - and a silent place for listening. Much easier then to plunge into the recorded interpretation or event, and vibrate with it, that emotional component real audio can convey.
I think that compressed music sounds dead, the only way to vibrate with it is to vibrate…physically, at excessively loud levels.
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Amen to that. 
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Gosh it’s too hard to reply to the right message for me 
Anyways I was trying to respond to “compressed music sounds dead”:
Often does. But can be quite okay with (1) right bitrate selection (2) no joint stereo. If you mean dynamic compression, yes, that’s what drove me to look beyond Spotify. I sometimes thought it was just me getting bored with music in general.
For me it was just hearing good sound on other systems and pursuing that
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Ancient? No. Say, instead, “seasoned”. “Experienced”. “Life-tested and proven”.
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Sounds more or less like the opening sentence of some of the LinkedIn bios.
It’s less and less importance for me to update my resume anymore. That makes me among the ancient lot. 
I’ve been into hifi for over 50 years and had a fair bit to do with people who play in live bands. My son, two of my brothers and many of their friends play in live bands. One thing that has confounded me and that I noticed with all of them is that they have very cheap music systems, under $200. Obviously they are more interested in the music and not the quality of equipment. Just maybe they have it right. For us the attainment of a good hifi system is more a hobby than about music. Neither approach is better than the other.
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I think musicians are more interested in making music than listening to music.
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Not this one
Totally agree, for musicians any playback equipment is just another tool for them to use to help them create music and there’s nothing wrong with that.
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I have noticed something like that. The musicians stepping out of the philharmonic back door with those apple ear buds (or what’s the name for them).
Might be that they are more interested in making music than listening to music.
Or maybe they know the real sound and no device can create the feeling that you play the violin inside a full orchestra. So they choose convenience. They know what quality is because they want a particular violin or guitar.
Or they can see further thru the vail of cheap sound. Like reading the notes and hearing the music inside the brain in that time.
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Sentimentality is a strange thing; I still have all my AAC albums I bought from iTunes circa 2010-15. You’d think that now I listen to DSD and 24/192 I would just delete them but I feel oddly attached to them.
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it’s true, I have all of my small iTunes library and a huge emusic library and Google and Amazon downloads as well almost all on MP3. The latter itunes at 256AAC is good quality as are Google at 320MP3 and Amazon at 256MP3.
A lot of my emusic library was at ~180MP3 so that really suffers when listening closely. I have been slowly replacing all the stuff I really like with CD quality or higher over the last 5 years or so and while I have probably replaced a few hundred albums I will never complete the work as there are many that I do not listen too, or rarely and I have Qobuz and Tidal to take care of that.
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