Spotify Is Testing a Lossless Subscription Tier For $15 to $20 Per Month (techcrunch.com)

Spotify is seemingly preparing to launch a lossless audio version of its streaming service. The offering, which is currently called Spotify Hi-Fi, will offer lossless CD-quality audio to users -- similar to what Tidal offers in its Hi-Fi service. From a report: For an extra $5 to $10, you could get all the features in Spotify Premium as well as lossless high fidelity streaming. There could also be a couple of new features. What is lossless quality anyway? Currently, if you go into Spotify's settings and choose the highest quality, Spotify serves you 320kbps audio files. It's very high quality, but it's not perfect -- in other words, it's a compromise. This way, files are still quite small and load quickly. Lossless files are perfect copies of the songs on an audio CD. They are then compressed, but without any quality loss.

Comments

Re:$10 for placebo quality

[misxn]

If you think your can hear the difference between 320kbps and lossless on a 44.1/16 track, you deserve to pay the extra $10 a month.

If you can *actually* hear the difference between 320kbps and lossless on a 44.1/16 track, and complain about it, you shouldn't want to listen to 44.1/16 music in the first place.

If you've destroyed your hearing sensitivity to not discern compressed music vs uncompressed, then you should be grateful a cheaper version option exists. Classical music is a great example, but if you are trying to hear the difference between a 320 kbps MP3 vs FLAC of Big Daddy Kane then the purpose will be missed.

Re: Cue the audiophiles in 3...2....

[QRDeNameland]

What are you talking about? Standard (Redbook) CD Audio is not in MP3 format by any stretch of the imagination.