Is Spotify Lossless really lossless? Report from my experiment

[tszynalski]

People make all sorts of claims about Spotify Lossless. Some believe that Spotify somehow processes "lossless" music to save bandwith, performs pre-equalization, pre-normalization, pre-compression, etc.
I decided to conduct an experiment to verify whether the audio played by Spotify Lossless matches the original CD recording. It was not easy to get Windows to operate in a bit-perfect way in shared mode, but in the end I managed to get the original audio stream (± 1 bit) out of Spotify.
If you're listening to Spotify Lossless (with equalization/normalization disabled) and it sounds worse than your CD or another streaming service, the most likely reason is that Spotify uses a different master. Before doing this experiment, I had no idea how many different masters there were for popular albums. It was quite a hassle to find a Spotify album that matched one of my CDs.
Detailed report here:
Is Spotify Lossless really lossless?

 

[Cbdb2]

People make all sorts of claims about Spotify Lossless. Some believe that Spotify somehow processes "lossless" music to save bandwith, performs pre-equalization, pre-normalization, pre-compression, etc.
I decided to conduct an experiment to verify whether the audio played by Spotify Lossless matches the original CD recording. It was not easy to get Windows to operate in a bit-perfect way in shared mode, but in the end I managed to get the original audio stream (± 1 bit) out of Spotify.
If you're listening to Spotify Lossless (with equalization/normalization disabled) and it sounds worse than your CD or another streaming service, the most likely reason is that Spotify uses a different master. Before doing this experiment, I had no idea how many different masters there were for popular albums. It was quite a hassle to find a Spotify album that matched one of my CDs.
Detailed report here:
Is Spotify Lossless really lossless?

Your links not working.

 

[tszynalski]

Your links not working.

Fixed, sorry about that.

 

[tszynalski]

I've posted an updated report. It turns out if you enable 24-bit output format in Windows, the off-by-one differences disappear and you can get a bit-perfect stream out of Spotify Lossless! (As long as the track is not loud enough to trigger the built-in Windows limiter.)
Full report here:
Is Spotify Lossless really lossless? (Part Deux)

 

[Sir Sanders Zingmore]

Why not post the analysis here instead of redirecting people to an unknown external site?

 

[antcollinet]

Why not post the analysis here instead of redirecting people to an unknown external site?

To be fair, it looks like a non monetised personal blog. I think it is fine to post a link to it. Certainly better than to random youtube vids with no summary that we get linked to all the time.

 

[voodooless]

A simple "yes" would suffice

It's a shame, though, that you'll have to go through so many hoops to get this done on Windows. They should implement an exclusive mode to control the DAC directly and evade the OS mixer.

 

[Ropeburn]

A simple "yes" would suffice

It's a shame, though, that you'll have to go through so many hoops to get this done on Windows. They should implement an exclusive mode to control the DAC directly and evade the OS mixer.

Doesn't ASIO do that already?

 

[voodooless]

Doesn't ASIO do that already?

I don't think Spotify supports ASIO. Having the driver installed doesn't mean the app will use it.

 

[Ropeburn]

I don't think Spotify supports ASIO. Having the driver installed doesn't mean the app will use it.

One of the saddest facts in computer life.

 

[voodooless]

People can upvote exclusive (WASAPI) mode here:

https://community.spotify.com/t5/Live-Ideas/Add-Bit-Perfect-Playback-WASAPI-Exclusive-Mode-on-Windows/idi-p/7125179