Notice the lack of hard cut-off and the reproduction below 18Khz, which looks almost identical. If you do that, then what you are actually listening to looks more like this:

However, this is not what you are listening to if you have a Spotify Premium account and turn the streaming quality settings up to Very High. Notice the hard cut-off at around 16Khz, and the almost patchy, rough-looking appearance of the lossy sample. Now when most people think about lossy visually, they imagine an extreme example like this: The lower the bitrate, the more of the original data is discarded.

Lossy compression - the original lossless recording is analyzed and audio information that is either beyond the range of human hearing or simply very difficult to hear is discarded, reducing the file size even further. Lossless compression - the original lossless recording is reduced in size but all the original audio information remains intact.

Read on.īefore we get much further, let's quickly talk about these two different types of audio compression: But once I started actually testing things out, those illusions were rapidly shattered. And before people in the comments jump in with 'What are you talking about? It's clear as day!' Yes, I know - I thought so too for a long time. Say what you like about the company's business practices or the user experience of the apps, but when it comes purely down to sound quality, I can tell you that all of the above statements are flat-out wrong. Hi all, so I notice that the topic of Spotify's long-awaited lossless service keeps popping up regularly and in the resulting discussion I often see the usual statements being made about the difference between Spotify Premium and lossless services like Tidal, Apple Music, and so on.

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