Remember, back in 2021, when Spotify announced Hi-Fi, teasing that it would be rolling out later that year? Well, that never happened. Instead, Spotify gave us a whole bunch of other things. Well, Hi-Fi is still not here, but the company just announced Spotify Lossless for high-resolution music streaming.
What is Spotify Lossless?
“Whether you’re diving into a new album or revisiting old favorites, lossless delivers the highest music audio quality on Spotify,” says Spotify. For audiophiles, numbers matter, of course. For them, the service is promising 24-bit/44.1 kHz FLAC streaming for songs.
That’s not the best, but still a notable leap. For comparison, Apple Music’s lossless dips between 16-bit/44.1 kHz (CD Quality) and 24-bit/192 kHz, while audio files are delivered over the in-house Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC) format.
If you like to stream songs on Amazon’s ecosystem, Amazon Music Unlimited promises Ultra High Definition tracks served at 24-bit, 192 kHz, which is nearly ten times higher in terms of bitrate compared to the usual lossy format. The end result is a richer music playback experience with more details, depth, and acoustic definition.
Who gets Spotify Lossless?
The lossless tier of Spotify’s music streaming service will be available to all Premium subscribers. It is accessible via mobile, desktop, tablets, and devices that support the Spotify Connect system, such as Sony, Bose, Samsung, and Sennheiser. Support for Amazon and Sonos hardware will go live next month.
Spotify Lossless will gradually roll out to users in more than 50 markets, but folks in the US have started to get access already (alongside those in Australia, Austria, Czechia, Denmark, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, and the UK), and will be notified about it via a notification or in-app nudge.
Lossless will have to be enabled manually for each device. When it’s active, users will see a “Lossless” indicator on the playback screen. As expected, it is best experienced using wired audio gear, and over a stable Wi-Fi connection. Bluetooth simply doesn’t offer enough bandwidth for hi-res music streaming, so there’s that bitter pill to swallow.
