You've probably heard the lossless audio, but what exactly does it mean, and how is it better than so-called lossy audio? We've got all the answers.
We’ve been hearing a lot about lossless audio lately. Apple Music says it has it. So does Amazon Music. Tidal and Qobuz have it too, but Spotify doesn’t.
A track that has been lossy compressed, however, no longer has all of the original data, and there’s no way to get it back when you decompress it. There are varying degrees of lossy compression. At the lowest level, lossy audio sounds pretty bad. If you’ve ever been on a phone call and the other person has sounded distorted and wobbly — that’s usually because of lossy compression.
What’s an example of a lossy audio format? The MP3 format is the poster child for lossy audio. It became ubiquitous in the late 1990s and early 2000s thanks its small size. Depending on the bitrate used, a song encoded as an MP3 can be as small as one-tenth the size of the same song encoded as an uncompressed file on a CD. Or put another way, they could be transferred in as little as 15 minutes.
Unfortunately, many MP3s don’t sound much better than FM radio, and even the best MP3s are considered by some to be inferior to uncompressed CD audio — widely thought of as the gold standard for digital audio. What about hi-res audio? Despite being more than 42 years old, CD audio remains the most popular form of uncompressed recorded digital audio. To some, it’s still the gold standard. For others, newer technology promises even greater levels of fidelity. Any audio that surpasses the amount of information captured by CD audio is known as hi-res audio.
Depending on your streaming service, you may have to enable lossless audio in the settings. Look for the option to change audio quality for three different scenarios depending on the app: Wi-Fi streaming, mobile streaming, and downloads. Some apps may not refer to lossless audio — Amazon Music, for instance, uses the terms HD and Ultra HD to refer to CD quality lossless and hi-res lossless, respectively.
At the moment, only one Bluetooth codec is lossless: aptX Lossless. However, it’s only supported on a few smartphones equipped with Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Sound platform, and it only works if the wireless earbuds/headphones are also aptX Lossless compatible. Even then, aptX Lossless only promises bit-perfect transmission of CD quality — not hi-res — audio.
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