As someone who loves to rock, I have to confess that I was excited that my favorite streaming service – Spotify – announced it is rolling out a new service tier for lossless audio streamingSure it costs more than what I’m paying now, but throwing away an expected $ 20 a month for perfect audio sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? My future road trips just got ten times better.
Could be.
This is what it’s about. I wouldn’t pay a cent more for “enhanced audio” on any streaming service, simply because the option exists. At least, not without seeing if I could tell the difference between the streaming service’s existing, high-quality offering and the lossless offering. I’m going to argue that in most cases, most people probably wouldn’t be able to tell the difference – and I’m not alone in saying this.
Like Napier Lopes from The Next Web writes
Spotify Premium (the existing $ 9.99 ad-free tier) already streams at a maximum of 320kbps (256kbps on the Internet) if you turned this on in the app’s settingsWhile at low bitrates the differences between lossy and lossless audio can be quite obvious, I bet most people cannot distinguish a lossless file from a 256 kbps MP3 – let alone one that has been compressed with the more modern Ogg codec that Spotify uses.
Our hearing is subject to many placebos. Simply believing that a particular upgrade or major specification will make your speakers or headphones sound better often leads to an ‘improvement’ rather than an actual change. Still, many gold-eared audiophiles will swear they can hear a difference without proof. “
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Since Spotify’s ‘HiFi’ service will not be released until later this year, you cannot test the lossless streaming directly. However, it is quite easy to see if you can tell the difference between audio files with different bitrates and compressions at this point. Lopes orders the ABX test with digital input, which gives you two audio files – an “A” and “B” sample – and a target sample. Your job is to say whether A or B matches the target, and you can choose between a faster five-track “can I lossy vs. lossless” test, a ten-track test, or a mega-20 track -test.
In other words, the test checks if you have a difference between a lossless and a lossy version of a song. And if you think it’s going to be easy, well … here’s what the test setup looks like when you start using it:
You click A, X or B to play a song, and you can switch between the different versions by clicking A, X or B as much as you want. Even then, I found it quite difficult to tell the difference between the files in most situations. Either my hearing is poor, or it’s just really, really difficult to separate Spotify’s 320 Kbps streaming – the highest quality – from a lossless file.
I won’t even show my results because honestly I was guessing most of the time. It’s plausible that my home audio setup – basically $ 150 headphones plugged directly into my desktop PC’s motherboard – just isn’t good enough to tell me the difference between a high-quality file and no loss. But even on a more souped-up setup, it’s a tough test, as a Reddit user describes
I did this test with LS50W in a treated room. I got about 65-70% correct. The point is, I had to REALLY focus hard, listen critically in a completely inorganic way. And even then, I still have a high percentage of errors. The difference was so negligible that I switched from Tidal to Spotify after taking that test. I haven’t looked back since then.
If you want a more bare-bones quiz, NPR also published a similar study in 2015 that you can use to test your ears. I have chosen the 320Kbps file very well with this one. But the lossless file? Not so much.
And if you happen to have a lossy and lossless file of the same song, you can try this old-school trick to compare the differences between the two:
Either way, I wouldn’t bother with a more expensive ‘hi-fi’ audio service if you can’t tell the difference between that and the ‘normal’ offering of a streaming service for everything you have at home: your headphones, your speakers or your ears . You spend money for a “benefit” that you will never appreciate, and that seems crazy.