You may be surprised that Spotify ® hasn’t yet entered the lossless streaming space. They were encoded with a proprietary system from a company called MQA (Master Quality Authenticated) and range from 26-bit/48 kHz to 24-bit/352.8 kHz. Many of the songs it makes available are from the TIDAL Masters catalog. TIDAL’s Hi-Fi Plus service is its most expensive tier.The classical-only streaming service Idagio also provides CD-quality audio.The Premium plan from Deezer provides music files at CD quality.The songs available on the service run the gamut from 16-bit/44.1 kHz to 24-bit/192 kHz. Apple Music ® uses its proprietary lossless codec called ALAC (short for Apple Lossless Audio Codec).Both Qobuz subscription levels (Studio and Sublime) provide 24-bit FLAC files, with sampling rates ranging from 48 kHz to 192 kHz.Amazon Music Unlimited’s premium plan offers up to 24-bit/192 kHz FLAC files.Here are the main differences between popular streaming services: Lossless high-res offerings vary in quality from one service to the next, but they all sound significantly better than compressed formats like MP3 or M4A. (If you’re wondering about the speed of your internet connection, plenty of free browser-based speed tests are available online.) Quality So with 9.216 Mbps files, you’d need about 20 Mbps or faster download speed.įor context, CD quality (16-bit/44.1 kHz audio) audio gets streamed at 1411 kbps - something that even a relatively slow connection of 3 Mbps or so can handle. The rule of thumb is that your internet download speed should be about twice the size of the most data-intensive files you’re streaming, or you might have issues. Many of the music services offer some content at 24-bit/192 kHz, which requires approximately 9216 kbps (9.216 megabits per second, or Mpbs for short) to stream in what we perceive as “real” time. Lossless codecs like FLAC (short for Free Lossless Audio Codec) ren’t able to cut the file size as much but still can shrink down a WAV file by 50 to 70 percent. An MP3 can often shrink a WAV file by 90 percent. Though they provide lesser sound quality, lossy codecs are better at decreasing file size. Lossy codecs discard some audio information in order to accomplish that goal, while lossless codecs reduce file size without removing any data. Completely uncompressed audio at CD quality (16-bit/44.1 kHz) and better (24-bit/48 kHz up to 352.8 kHz) results in audio files that are too large to stream easily.Ī codec (short for code/decode) algorithm is used to shrink digital audio files. The tricky part of streaming high-res files is that the better the quality (that is the higher the bit resolution and sampling rate), the bigger the file size and the faster the internet download speed required. Here’s a guide to the lossless options available out there. Some charge more for the privilege, while others make it available in all their paid plans. These days, most streaming music services offer lossless options. For those with keen enough ears to notice the reduction of quality inherent in music that utilizes a “lossy” codec like MP3 or AAC, this was a significant breakthrough. Almost ten years ago, TIDAL became the first streaming music service to offer music encoded with lossless compression.
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