With lossless audio coming to Spotify Premium, this high-fidelity audio option is now available to most music streaming subscribers on big services. That’s great in principle, but is it worth sacrificing your bandwidth, storage space, and paying a premium to have access to lossless media?
The truth is that most people likely won’t benefit much, if at all, from switching to lossless audio, and it depends on what equipment you have and, of course, your own ears and brain. So the question isn’t so much whether anyone can hear the difference between lossless and lossy music compression, but whether you can. Because if you can’t, then there’s little point in wasting your time and money on it.
What “Lossless” and “Compressed” Really Mean
It’s important to understand what “lossless” even means in the context of media like audio. There seems to be a common misconception that lossless audio is uncompressed, which is not the case. Compression is just a data encoding method that uses various tricks to store data using less space on a storage medium. For example, the compression algorithm finds redundant or repeating data, and then swaps it out for a smaller placeholder, and one copy of the redundancy. When the data is uncompressed, the original data is restored.
“Lossless” and “lossy” are both types of compression. A zipped file is lossless, because when you unzip it, every original bit is still there from the original file. A JPEG, however, is a “lossy” file compression method, because much of the data in the original RAW image is permanently lost and can never be restored from the JPEG.
So if you took an uncompressed waveform from, for example, a music CD and used FLAC to compress it, the music would take up much less space than the original data, but when you uncompress it, every single bit and byte from the original waveform is still there. If you used a lossy format such as MP3, then converting it back to an uncompressed waveform results in a different file with less audio detail in it.
How Much the Human Ear Can Actually Hear
The issue isn’t so much that lossy formats lose some data, it’s what data they lose that matters. With any lossy format, the idea is to get rid of data that you’re unlikely to notice. In the case of audio, the idea is to remove data that you can’t hear anyway.
The average human ear hears frequencies between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz, but that range shrinks as we age or expose ourselves to loud environments. CD audio, for example, captures some audio in a range most people can’t hear. On top of this, you need to take psychoacoustics (how our brains process sound) into account as well. It’s a complex science, but the engineers behind these compression algorithms use knowledge of how we hear to snip out things that your brain will fill in automatically.
We also can’t assume a perfect listening environment. Most people aren’t listening to their music on expensive equipment in a treated room. So, for the human ear, there may be no difference between lossy and lossless audio on the average set of headphones. Also, if you’re using wireless headphones with Bluetooth technology, that’s inherently a limitation on quality because Bluetooth doesn’t have much bandwidth and the Bluetooth audio codec itself is lossy.
In practice, most people can’t consistently tell the difference between high-bitrate lossy and lossless formats. The threshold of transparency (the point where compression becomes inaudible) often falls somewhere around 256–320Kbps for modern codecs like AAC or OGG.
When Lossless Really Matters—and When It Doesn’t
Lossless audio absolutely has its place. If you’re archiving your music collection, editing in a DAW, or listening on a high-end system that reveals every detail, lossless ensures no degradation no matter how many times you convert or edit the file. In other words, it’s a great way to store audio using less storage space, without damaging the integrity of the original at all.
As a way to listen to music, the utility of lossless audio is less clear. Some audiophiles with top-tier headphones or studio monitors can appreciate those fine differences—especially with acoustic, classical, or live recordings. At least, that’s what some people claim, but that’s a subjective report of an experience. You’d need to subject people to a double-blind test where they don’t know whether what they’re listening to is lossless or not. If someone can pick out the lossless audio file at a rate significantly above chance, then it’s hard to argue that lossless audio doesn’t have an audible difference.
That’s, of course, a different conversation from whether whatever audible difference there might be is worth the other tradeoffs that come with lossless audio I mentioned before. Still, it’s time to find out if you can hear the difference at all.
Take the Test Right Now
There are several different online tests where you can check if lossless audio is detectable to your ears. This isn’t just a test of your ability to hear the difference in principle, but also of your equipment.
I’m going to suggest the NPR lossless audio test and the ABX high-fidelity test. I like the NPR test in particular because you have three audio files to listen to. One is lossless uncompressed audio, one is a 320kbps MP3, and the other a 128kbps MP3. However, the ABX test is also important, because the ABX design doesn’t simply have you pick which one is lossless. Instead, you listen to the two samples, and then listen to a random selection of either, and must tell whether it was A or B you listened to. The ABX approach gives you a more statistically reliable result.
Before you take one or both of these tests, do the following:
- Pick out your best set of wired headphones. This needs to be an analogue wiring setup. For example, using the Lightning or USB adapter on something like AirPods Max doesn’t count. The music goes through an analog-to-digital conversion here and these headphones are fundamentally incapable of lossless audio because they don’t support lossless codecs. If your headphones do support lossless audio over a digital connection, then that’s fine. In my case, my AirPods Max are out, but I did the test using the analogue cable of my Sony WH-1000XM4 Bluetooth headphones.
- If you’re using speakers, try to listen to the audio at the highest volume you find comfortable without introducing distortion. That’s because some finer details in the music may be inaudible at lower volumes.
- Try to listen in a quiet environment, and if your headphones support Active Noise Cancellation, turn it on to maximize the odds of hearing fine detail.
So, how did you do? In the NPR test, I never mistook the 128kbps MP3 for lossless or high-quality. Since in most kinds of music you can hear the compression artifacts on good headphones. I had no way of telling the difference between 320kbps MP3s and an uncompressed WAV file. In the ABX test, I scored no better than random chance, and honestly I was just guessing because I could not tell.
Use your results to figure out if it’s worth going lossless with your current equipment or your ears, and you may just end up saving money, time, and space, and isn’t that the real “lossless” way to listen to music?
- Brand
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Sony
- Battery Life
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30 hours
- Bluetooth
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Yes
- Noise Cancellation
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Yes
- Foldable
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Yes
- Charging type
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USB-C