Around ten years ago, it used to be that most of the music I listened to was from my own personal file collection in lossless formats. Over time though as my music tastes changed and I leaned on streaming more and more, my collection didn’t keep up and I stopped paying attention to audio quality as much as I once did.

So I was pretty excited when Spotify just added lossless audio quality as an option! I’m definitely no audiophile, but I’ve been having a great time going back and rediscovering music I’ve never heard in lossless quality before now.

A quick explainer

If you’re wondering what all this is even about, I’ll try my best to give a quick rundown. Most digital audio formats like mp3 are compressed using lossy compression methods, meaning that some information is discarded, most notably to save on file size. Lossless formats like flac don’t discard information, so you get a full quality file but with a sacrifice to file size.

What does that mean in practice?

In general, what I’ve noticed in my listening is that lossless music tends to feel much wider, with individual instruments having more definition and being easier to distinguish from one another. Different instruments can tend to disappear into each other in lossy formats when there’s a lot going on, and you don’t get that with lossless. Because of that, the stereo effect to me feels more pronounced with lossless as well.

Some instruments also have their own unique qualities which come across much better in lossless. I personally notice it the most in string instruments, but that could be because they’re the ones I have experience playing.

Is it worth it?

For me, 100%! I’ve already converted all my Spotify downloads to lossless quality. My phone today has way more storage than the one I was using ten years ago. I’m nowhere close to running out, so I may as well make use of it.

I really don’t think you need very high-end equipment to enjoy lossless music either. As long as you have something halfway decent to listen on, I suspect you’ll be able to tell a difference big enough to make the file size tradeoff worth it. I’m just using the Bluetooth earbuds I picked up a few months ago (Nothing Ears, I recommend them!) and it’s like I’m hearing them for the first time again.

What I’ve been listening to

This should come as no surprise if you know me, but I’ve been relistening to the Outer Wilds soundtrack again. It’s one of the albums I’ve noticed the biggest difference in. Could it be because I already know it like the back of my hand? Ok, maybe. But the point that it sounds incredible still stands.

I’ve also been listening to some electronic albums like the Cyberpunk 2077 soundtrack and the recently released Tron Ares soundtrack. Again, these sound great. Perfect work music too.

The recent Fleshwater and Thrice albums have really stuck with me since they came out. I’ve also been going back to some of Erra’s and Invent Animate’s stuff too.

As we head into colder weather here pretty soon I expect I’ll be going back to some other artists like Grivo and Holy Fawn again.

Thoughts?

If you’ve got any thoughts about lossless music I’d love to hear them. And you know I always appreciate a good artist recommendation.

— JP