View Course
In case you haven’t heard, streaming platform Spotify has announced that later this year they are launching ‘Spotify Hi-Fi’ boasting a CD-quality, lossless audio format for listeners.
Here at Sonic Academy HQ, we thought we’d put it to the test to see if we can notice the difference and if it’s going to be worth the upgrade for the majority of users out there.
Using three different tuned-in environments form Chris’s home studio setup, Protoculture’s studio and Phil’s high-end studio setup let’s check out the results!
Here’s the link if you want to try it yourself:
As Nate says, it depends on the material and the mastering whether obvious artifacts will be in the lossy encoding. I bet if you picked 5 modern club tracks, compressed to -9 dB LUFS and rendered at 0 dBFS, I’m betting you’d get over 80%. Before I knew any better, I used to buy mp3 club tracks and all of them are clipped, sometimes as much a +4.5dB. The corresponding lossless files have no clipping. Do I blame the mastering engineer, no way. I’m doing the same in my own productions. Listen to the lossless version of my tracks, that’s the only version I care about.
This test was interesting. Every person I met claiming they can hear a clear difference failed miserably when doing a blind test. This lossless thing is pure snake oil, in my opinion. If there was a clear difference in quality, people would succeed 100% every time.
Yeah any dynamic material or live sounding stuff its incredibly hard to tell… although i do tend to notice a difference in top end with stuff thats really pushed hard. something about the hats / rides sounds a bit slushy. IMO it makes zero practical difference unless you are are A/Bing