It’s plausible that my home audio setup - basically, a $US150 ($189) pair of headphones plugged directly into my desktop PC’s motherboard - simply isn’t good enough to allow me to hear the difference between a high-quality and lossless file. I won’t even show my results, because I was honestly just guessing most of the time. Either my hearing sucks, or it’s just really, really difficult to separate Spotify’s 320Kbps streaming - its highest quality - from a lossless file. Even then, I found it pretty difficult to tell the difference between the files in most situations. You click on A, X, or B to start playing a track, and you can switch between the different versions by clicking A, X, or B all you want. And if you think it’s going to be easy, well…here’s what the testing setup looks like when you go to use it: In other words, the test is checking to see if you can tell a difference between a lossless and a lossy version of a song. lossless” test of five tracks, a ten-track test, or a mega-20-track test. Your job is to say whether A or B matches the target, and you can pick between a faster “can I tell lossy vs. Lopes recommends the Digital Feed ABX Test, which gives you two audio files - an “A” and “B” sample - as well as a target sample. However, it’s pretty easy to see whether you can tell the difference between audio files of different bitrates and compressions right now. Since Spotify’s “HiFi” service won’t come out until later this year, you can’t test out its lossless streaming directly.
Still, many golden-eared audiophiles will swear they can hear a difference without evidence.” Simply believing that a certain upgrade or key specification will make your speakers or headphones sound better is often more likely to cause to an ‘improvement’ than any actual change. Our hearing is subject to a whole lot of placebo.
Although at low bitrates the differences between lossy and lossless audio can be quite obvious, I’m willing to bet most people can’t tell apart a lossless file from a 256 kbps MP3 one - let alone a file compressed with the more modern Ogg codec that Spotify uses. “Spotify Premium (the existing, $US9.99 ($13) ad-free tier) already streams at a maximum of 320 kbps (256 kbps on the web) if you’ve enabled this in the app’s settings.
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