Lossless Listening Arrives on Spotify Premium

[jareinertson]

True. There are countless examples of this. I would eat my hat if that weren't the case here for example, from the best album of 2022:

Compared to the Steven Wilson multichannel mixdown, clearly we can see the CD version is highly dynamically compressed! Notice that on the DTS-HD MA version, the track gets louder near the end of the song, notice that much of this dynamic potential has been completely squandered in the CD version.
View attachment 511472

For comparison, here's a look at the track DR values side-by-side (measured with foobar2000 and Dynamic Range Meter plugin) - CD versus Wilson downmix dithered down to 16-bits:
View attachment 511473
https://archimago.blogspot.com/2022/04/demo-tears-for-fears-no-small-thing-low.html

____
Jean Francois has done an incredible job, check out this thread:

182 reviews, 1082 editions tested, the complete list …

Hello, Here’s a new milestone with over 1,000 versions tested across 182 album reviews. I would like to thank you especially for the support and encouragement you’ve been sending me regularly for more than three years now. These 1,082 analyzed versions are distributed across a wide variety of...

www.audiosciencereview.com

This is a sad truth about the state of music sources.

 

[Multiway]

This is a sad truth about the state of music sources.

But you could argue it is a lot better today and more accessible than the 70s with rack up rack of micro grooved 33rpm poor quality vinyl!
Let alone the 78rpm era

We have such choice today!

I agree that things can always be better though. Keep pointing out / requesting better.

 

[DanielT]

But you could argue it is a lot better today and more accessible than the 70s with rack up rack of micro grooved 33rpm poor quality vinyl!
Let alone the 78rpm era

We have such choice today!

I agree that things can always be better though. Keep pointing out / requesting better.

In the long term, yes, but the sad thing is that the development went in the direction of better sound and was then torpedoed by the loudness war, just because the radio stations want to have a high louder sound in order to call attention to the listeners.
AI:


Pretty unnecessary now because,... well, how many people tune in to FM radio stations these days? Besides, it's mostly podcast talk radio that's popular now.

That said, I listen to a lot of music via internet radio these days. For example:

An eclectic musical adventure...

Radio Paradise streams highly curated, eclectic mixes of music -- chosen by real humans -- with unparalleled audio quality.

radioparadise.com

Plus my favorite station:

SomehowJazz - Jazz Radio

Audiophile quality jazz radio features the best cuts from jazz funk, fusion and other contemporary genres of jazz. High quality streaming up to 320 kbps.

somehowjazz.com

 

[Petevid]

In the long term, yes, but the sad thing is that the development went in the direction of better sound and was then torpedoed by the loudness war, just because the radio stations want to have a high louder sound in order to call attention to the listeners.
AI:
View attachment 511650

Pretty unnecessary now because,... well, how many people tune in to FM radio stations these days? Besides, it's mostly podcast talk radio that's popular now.

That said, I listen to a lot of music via internet radio these days. For example:

An eclectic musical adventure...

Radio Paradise streams highly curated, eclectic mixes of music -- chosen by real humans -- with unparalleled audio quality.

radioparadise.com

Plus my favorite station:

SomehowJazz - Jazz Radio

Audiophile quality jazz radio features the best cuts from jazz funk, fusion and other contemporary genres of jazz. High quality streaming up to 320 kbps.

somehowjazz.com

I thought it was due to individual artists/producers wanting their tracks to stand out when played on radio stations

 

[DanielT]

I thought it was due to individual artists/producers wanting their tracks to stand out when played on radio stations

Standing out and attracting attention is nothing new. To increase advertising revenue, record sales, and so on.

It's just that the modern loudness war had negative consequences in terms of sound quality.

 

[Karmacoma]

In the long term, yes, but the sad thing is that the development went in the direction of better sound and was then torpedoed by the loudness war, just because the radio stations want to have a high louder sound in order to call attention to the listeners.
AI:
View attachment 511650

Pretty unnecessary now because,... well, how many people tune in to FM radio stations these days? Besides, it's mostly podcast talk radio that's popular now.

That said, I listen to a lot of music via internet radio these days. For example:

An eclectic musical adventure...

Radio Paradise streams highly curated, eclectic mixes of music -- chosen by real humans -- with unparalleled audio quality.

radioparadise.com

Plus my favorite station:

SomehowJazz - Jazz Radio

Audiophile quality jazz radio features the best cuts from jazz funk, fusion and other contemporary genres of jazz. High quality streaming up to 320 kbps.

somehowjazz.com

I digress but the '' tune in'' app is really great, it's also included in the Wiim home app if you have a Wiim product. It gives you access to a plethora of radios around the world, all kinds of genre and countries. A must have.

 

[Petrushka]

I may have posted this before, but I’ve had Spotify lossless for several weeks on SONOS. I’m old and can’t hear the difference, but see no reason to pass it up. There are younger people visiting. Mostly using the PORT, with a WiiM amp and KEF 105.3s.

The Port has so many more streaming options than the Wiim, I think it is a rational option.

Audible, for example. And XM.

If a few hundred dollars makes or breaks your budget, WiiM is the obvious choice. But they work together nicely.

The SONOS app was on life support for a year, but it’s back.

 

[mikitm]

Has anyone tried the new beta feature Exclusive mode on Windows PCs? Sounds pretty good to me!

 

[A Surfer]

You really shouldn't be hearing any difference unless they are cooking the books so to speak and say boosting output levels just enough on lossless streams. I don't know if they or anyone does this, but it would be possible I imagine and I wouldn't be shocked if it is done.

We know that all else being equal, louder is typically perceived as sounding better. Unless it becomes so loud as to distort etc.

 

[Ambient384]

Same here. But I got to be honest, it took a lot to get to this point and admit it to myself lol. I would love to be that one guy who can hear the difference between lossless and even the free low Spotify tier. Those compression algorithms are just too good and based on decades of psycho-acoustic research and studies.

Yep. I still use 160kbps AAC even with a 1TB card because I've long albums that average 1.32Mbit in FLAC but with the 160kbps setting I get 192 ~ 340kbps.

Just noticed that Opus at 128kbps blow's every other codec out of the water, I still blown away at what Opus can do.

 

[A Surfer]

Yep. I still use 160kbps AAC even with a 1TB card because I've long albums that average 1.32Mbit in FLAC but with the 160kbps setting I get 192 ~ 340kbps.

Just noticed that Opus at 128kbps blow's every other codec out of the water, I still blown away at what Opus can do.

Evidence for this claim?

 

[xray]

I still blown away at what Opus can do

Perhaps you can share with us what exactly opus can do that other codecs can't?

 

[norcalscott]

Perhaps you can share with us what exactly opus can do that other codecs can't?

The question wasn't aimed at me but I will respond - I am not sure that "blow other CODECs out of the water" is appropriate, but there is a lot of information out there about why Opus is marginally superior to some other CODECs - the best encapsulation of this is probably the Opus Wikipedia page - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opus_(audio_format)

I have recently switched to Opus for archiving my extensive FLAC collection in the cloud (I keep multiple backups of my FLAC files but 400GB / ~50,000 tracks of cloud storage is not easy to manage). I've encoded everything to Opus 320kbps, which is probably overkill but the file sizes are about 25% or lower versus FLAC and I cannot discern any difference in sound quality.

My main reason for making the switch to Opus is that it is completely open source and royalty free and that is important to me. It's now supported in all the media player apps I use (Symfonium, USB APP, PowerAmp, etc.). Symfonium for example has a new "play from Google Drive" option and it was unusable with FLAC files but does an excellent job of handling the smaller Opus files with even a moderately decent Wi-Fi or 5G connection.

 

[krabapple]

Opus, AAC, and MP3 all rate highly in Hydrogenaudio popularity polls, with Opus seeming to have stolen some of MP3's 'market share' in last decade.

2025 Lossy format poll - Page 2

2025 Lossy format poll - Page 2

hydrogenaudio.org

 

[Tell]

Perhaps you can share with us what exactly opus can do that other codecs can't?

It's transparent at around 160kbps, while other codecs needs higher bitrates to do the same. Opus actually sounds quite good at 64kbps, while MP3 especially do have quite noticeable issues there.
Personally I'd way rather see Spotify go for Opus instead of lossless, because we need more efficiency, not less. But the only music streaming service that uses Opus that I know of is Soundcloud, but I find it a bit sad that they didn't opt for 128kbps instead of it's current 64kbps.

 

[xray]

It's transparent at around 160kbps, while other codecs needs higher bitrates to do the same. Opus actually sounds quite good at 64kbps, while MP3 especially do have quite noticeable issues there.
Personally I'd way rather see Spotify go for Opus instead of lossless, because we need more efficiency, not less. But the only music streaming service that uses Opus that I know of is Soundcloud, but I find it a bit sad that they didn't opt for 128kbps instead of it's current 64kbps.

Have you experienced any meta data issues with Opus?

 

[shuppatsu]

It's transparent at around 160kbps, while other codecs needs higher bitrates to do the same. Opus actually sounds quite good at 64kbps, while MP3 especially do have quite noticeable issues there.
Personally I'd way rather see Spotify go for Opus instead of lossless, because we need more efficiency, not less. But the only music streaming service that uses Opus that I know of is Soundcloud, but I find it a bit sad that they didn't opt for 128kbps instead of it's current 64kbps.

Amazon uses Opus, or at least they did a couple years ago back when I used it. And sadly, they used it wrong (or stated that they did), as many tracks stated they were encoded at 44.1KHz, which the Opus encoder can do, but it’s not officially supported and strongly recommended against. The lossy version of at least one album on their service was completely ruined by artifacts (ironically audiophile-bait Diana Krall), though I don’t know for sure if it was caused by the 44.1KHz encoding flag or something else.

Spotify uses Vorbis which is practically the same as Opus for typical medium bitrate stuff that music streaming services use. Where Opus really shines is the low bitrate/low latency stuff.

 

[Chrispy]

FWIW after a few months of some devices supporting, others not....still makes little difference to me (other than the knowledge of whether its lossy or lossless, but have been a premium user for a long time otoh)