Spotify yesterday announced a ‘HiFi’ update level for its streaming service that offers lossless audio, promising music without compression artifacts. Although not available until the end of this year, Spotify HiFi promises “CD quality” audio and aims to remove audiophiles from other lossless streaming competitions, such as Tidal and Deezer.
But even if you consider yourself an audiophile, you probably don’t need to overpay for lossless music.
It is true that most music streaming services compress audio in one way or another to minimize data usage, almost always leading to the loss of some information. Over there we are ways to compress lossless music, but generally can’t reduce file size as much as decent lossy compression.
It is not surprising, then, that most services switch to lossy compression. After all, the vast majority of listeners do not have the auditory capacity to distinguish between lossless audio and compressed music with high enough quality.
Spotify Premium (the existing level, $ 9.99 without ads) already streams to a maximum of 320 kbps (256 kbps on the web) if you have enabled this in the application settings. Although at low bit rates the differences between lossy and lossless audio can be quite obvious, I am willing to bet that most people cannot distinguish a lossless file from a 256 kbps MP3 – let alone a file compressed with most modern Ogg codec that Spotify uses.
Our hearing is subject to a lot of placebo. Simply believing that a certain update or major specification will make your speakers or headphones sound better tends to “improve” than any real change. Still, many golden-eared audiophiles will swear they can hear the difference without evidence.
So, before you pick up your wallet for the promise of high quality audio, why don’t you put your hearing to the test?
Test your hearing
There are many blind tests to help you compare lossless audio with ‘lossy’ audio formats, but I like the Digital Feed ABX test, initially designed to test whether listeners can tell the difference between Tidal’s lossless audio and lossy compressed music.
The link above compares Spotify’s 320 kbps streaming to a lossless file, so it should be equivalent to comparing Spotify’s Premium and HiFi levels. In this test, the goal is to combine one of the two clips (A or B) with a reference clip (X). They are randomized and you don’t know which clips are lossy or not; you just need to choose whether A or B is identical to X.
There are five tracks, for each of which you will have to complete 5, 10 or 20 attempts, depending on how much time you have to kill. The more tests you do, the more statistically significant your results will be. I recommend starting with 5 reps, as the test can take a long time while you switch between tracks obsessed with small differences.
If you’re like most audio enthusiasts – not to mention most ordinary people – you probably won’t be able to hear the difference. I just auditioned with $ 400 headphones and failed.
But I also passed the test before. The problem is that doing this involves a type of extreme scrutiny that virtually never applies to normal listening or even “critical” listening.
In my case, passing this comparison means leaving my home as quiet as possible, using the best equipment I have, and repeat a two or three second portion indefinitely in the hope of hearing the slightest extra detail or a subtle change at a specific time. In addition, I did this type in several iterations hundreds of times and to meet what to look for.
Perhaps even more importantly, being able to identify which tracks match does not mean that you can know which track was more realist – that is, which track was actually lossless.
I remember a survey conducted by the audio blogger Archimago several years ago, in which 151 participants were asked to choose between two sets of samples – a lossy set and a lossless set. 30% thought the lossless tracks sounded better. 18% said there was no audible difference. An impressive 52%, in fact preferred the lossy track about lossless (there are some possible explanations for this beyond the scope of the article).
You see, it is fair to assume that these participants were also audio enthusiasts; 60% of them reported using audio systems that cost $ 1,000 or more. And this is just one of several examples on the web.
So, what’s the point of lossless?
The fact that most people do not know the difference between lossless audio and high bit rate audio does not mean that lossless streaming is completely useless. Some reasons you may want to try include:
- Peace of mind, so you don’t feel the itch to know that there is something better out there.
- If the placebo effect makes you think your music sounds better, then in a way does it sound better?
- You want the best possible interpretation of the music for some sense of musical ‘purity’.
- You are a statistical anomaly with platinum listening skills.
- There is a very hypothetical argument that we need to listen longer to really hear small differences in sound quality.
- Spotify can include other benefits with the HiFi layer.
- You hope that one day the audio equipment will be good enough to make the difference more obvious.
There is also the price issue: Spotify has not yet announced the price for the HiFi level, but you can bet it will be more expensive than the old Premium. Just make sure that the monthly investment added – and it definitely increases over the years – is worth it before you shell out your hard-earned money.
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Published on February 24, 2021 – 05:29 UTC