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Spotify yesterday announced a “ HiFi ” level of upgrade for its streaming service which provides lossless sound, promising music without compression artifacts. Although not available until later this year, Spotify HiFi promises “CD quality” sound and aims to distance audiophiles from other lossless streaming competitors like Tidal and Deezer.
But even if you think of yourself as an audiophile, you probably don’t need to pay extra for lossless music.
It is true that most music streaming services compress audio in some way to minimize data usage, which almost always results in loss of information. The are ways to compress music losslessly, but they usually cannot reduce file size as much as decent lossy compression.
So it’s no surprise that most services are turning to lossy compression. After all, the vast majority of listeners don’t have the hearing ability to tell the difference between lossless sound and compressed music of high enough quality.
Spotify Premium (the existing ad-free tier at $ 9.99) already streams at a maximum of 320kbps (256kbps on the web) if you’ve enabled that in the app settings. Although at low bitrates the differences between lossy and lossless audio can be quite obvious, I’m willing to bet that most people cannot distinguish a lossless file from a 256 kbps MP3 file. – not to mention a file compressed with the more modern Ogg codec. that Spotify uses.
Our hearing is subjected to a lot of placebo. Simply believing that a certain upgrade or key specification will improve the sound of your speakers or headphones is often more likely to result in an “ improvement ” than any real change. Yet many audiophiles with golden ears will swear they can hear a difference without proof.
So before you pull out your wallet for the promise of better sound, why don’t you actually put your hearing to the test?
Test your hearing
There are plenty of blind tests to help you compare lossless audio with “ lossy ” audio formats, but I like the Digital Feed ABX test, originally created to test if listeners could do the difference between lossless audio from Tidal 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 objective is to associate one of the two clips (A or B) with a reference clip (X). They are random and you don’t know which clips are lossless or not; you just have to choose whether A or B is identical to X.
There are five tracks, each of which you’ll need to complete 5, 10, or 20 trials, depending on how long you have to kill. The more tests you do, the more statistically significant your results. I would recommend starting with 5 reps as the test can take a long time as you move from track to track obsessing over tiny differences.
If you’re like most audio enthusiasts – let alone most regular people – you probably won’t be able to hear the difference. I just passed the test with $ 400 headphones and failed.
But I also passed the test before. The problem is, it involves a kind of scrutiny that hardly ever applies to normal listening or even “critical” listening.
In my case, passing this comparison means making my home as quiet as possible, using the best equipment I have, and repeat over and over for a part of two or three seconds in the hope of hearing any additional detail or subtle change at a specific moment. Also, I have done this type in several iterations hundreds of times and know what to look for.
Perhaps more importantly, being able to identify which tracks match doesn’t mean you can tell which track was the most realistic – that is, which track was in fact the lossless track.
It reminds me of a survey carried out by 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% think lossless leads sound better. 18% said there was no audible difference. A whopping 52% in fact preferred the lossy track on lossless (there are some possible explanations for this beyond the scope of the article).
Mind you, it’s fair to assume that these attendees were mostly audio enthusiasts too; 60% of them reported using audio systems costing $ 1,000 or more. And this is just one of the many examples on the web.
So what’s the point of lossless?
Just because most people can’t tell the difference between lossless and high-bitrate lossy audio doesn’t mean lossless streaming is completely useless. Here are a few reasons why you might want to try it:
- Peace of mind, so you don’t want to know that there is something better out there.
- If the placebo effect makes you think your music sounds better, then somehow it sounds better?
- You want the best possible interpretation of music for a sense of musical “purity”.
- You are a statistical anomaly with platinum hearing abilities.
- There is a very hypothetical argument that we need prolonged listening to really hear small differences in sound quality.
- Spotify could include other benefits with the HiFi level.
- You hope that one day the audio equipment will be good enough to make the difference more obvious.
There is also the question of price: Spotify has yet to announce a price for the HiFi level, but you can bet it will be more expensive than the old Premium. Just make sure the extra monthly investment – and it certainly adds up over the years – is worth it before you fork out your hard-earned cash.
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Published February 24, 2021 – 05:29 UTC
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