The most popular music streaming services – like Apple Music, Amazon Music or Spotify – are making lossless music all the rage, but What exactly does “lossless” mean in terms of audio?
To reduce storage space and bandwidth consumption, music files are often compressed.
MP3 was one of the first compressed formats to take off, with AAC/MP4 being the dominant format today.
When a file is compressed, its size is reduced because some data is discarded. When data is discarded, audio quality is degraded. This can be seen in the ups and downs of a recording.
Lossless audio is also compressed.
Lossless audio is also compressed, but this preserves audio detail. Lossless audio is always presented at CD quality resolution of 16bit / 44.1kHz or higher and can go up to 24bit / 192kHz.
The trade-off is storage or bandwidth consumption, if streaming.
Formats such as FLAC or ALAC (Apple Lossless) are about half the size of an uncompressed original recording. By comparison, a lossy version could consume much less space, about 20 percent of the original uncompressed recording.
How can you listen to lossless audio?
Tidal was one of the first streaming services to offer lossless audio, but the feature was added to Apple Music at no additional cost and later to Amazon Music as well.
Spotify He’s also about to release a separate layer called Spotify Hifi for lossless audio. Other services that offer lossless audio are Deezer and Qobuz.
Before upgrading your subscription, make sure you have the necessary hardware to enjoy lossless audio. For example, many wireless headphones and Bluetooth speakers use their own form of lossy compression to carry audio from the device to the ears.
This includes the full range of Apple AirPods (even AirPods Max) and the vast majority of standard Bluetooth headsets that use lossy codecs like aptX.
The good news is that there are new lossless codecs on the way, like aptX HD. Note that some “high resolution” solutions such as LDAC (included in many Sony wireless headphones) does not have the bandwidth needed to pass through unaltered lossless audio.
Some devices require an external digital-to-analog converter (DAC) to play music at resolutions that exceed CD quality. For example, the iPhone DAC can produce lossless CD-quality audio over cable.
Can you really tell the difference?
Most people can hear the difference between a low-bitrate MP3 and modern Spotify or Apple Music streaming. The question is whether you can distinguish modern transmissions from their lossless counterparts.
The equipment you use to hear the audio – the headphones, the amplifier, the room acoustics – can make a bigger difference than the quality of the audio. And, of course, there is also your own ear.