Audio watermarking is old hat, and it’s FAR easier for Zoom than for say a music service, because people are used to imperfections/stuttering/blurring in their Zoom calls which can just be encoded watermarks.
Pasting a comment I found intersting & funny from one of the commenters of that article:
"...It is a strange thing that the real quality audio is now reserved for the pirates. This industry really knows how to hit a target."
Listening to the samples (I got a nice BeO over-ears headset that has very good performance), I also realized that Spotify gives me some noise, I also thought it's a codec/digital thing.. little do I know..
I'm a Spotify subscriber but I'd be the first to admit that Spotify's audio quality isn't great to begin with, even when set to high quality streaming. It's noticeably worse than uncompressed CD quality (ignoring CDs that were mastered from sources that were lossily compressed to begin with - what a great trend that was).
This isn't a complaint, more an observation: Spotify works really well if you're outside, in a car, or even in an office environment with plenty of low level background noise. It's not so great when you run it through a half-decent hifi in your own home. Still, good enough for casual listening. However, if you're paying attention, you'll notice the flaws easily.
So, some of that noise is probably just that: noise. But some of it will also no doubt be the watermark.
Fortunately I didn't pay that much for my setup. Amp and speakers are about 30 years old and were given to me by my stepdad about 20 years ago. Pretty much everything else is second hand from eBay and 25 - 40 years old (CD player, tuner, tape, EQ).
The biggest expense is the subwoofer, which I did buy new because used prices for a decent subwoofer are still pretty high, especially when you factor in the cost of petrol to go and collect the thing (most people don't want to post because they weigh a lot).
The only other new components are an inexpensive Bluetooth 5.0 receiver, the speaker cable (Bassface, which I want to say was about £2/metre - super-cheap by audiophile standard) and gold-plated banana plugs from RS components. All the interconnects are I think Amazon Basics.
So my total expenditure for the whole system is less than £1,000. Fully half of that is the subwoofer. Admittedly, that's still probably a fair bit by most peoples' standards, especially when it's perfectly possible to get very good sound from a hifi separates system for £250 or so (see Techmoan's video series on the topic, for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSY1iZqH118), but it's chickenfeed for most audiophiles. Still, I'm definitely not one of those guys: it sounds more than good enough to me and I've no desire to fall any further into that particular black hole.
Except for one thing... I don't have a turntable. So what I'm probably going to do is buy a pair of SL1210s and a mixer to plug in to the system. I'm lucky enough to have a fair number of 12" singles from a freecycle "barn find" type situation a few years ago, and another time-consuming hobby to get through the rest of this pandemic will be no bad thing.
There is both a danger and a satisfaction to mostly cobbling together a nice sounding system from lots of second-hand parts though. The temptation for me is to do the same again with one or two of the other rooms in the house.
At first I thought they meant Bang & Olufsen, a high-end brand that prefixes all their products with Beo [0]. But I guess the industry is making Beryllium drivers now [1].
