Amazon music HD offering HiFi quality music streaming is now available as part of the standard tier of Amazon music. Apple Music has announced that they will shortly be streaming music with Lossless compressing. While we continue to wait for Spotify to launch their own HiFi stream. You are asking yourself “Will I really be able to hear the difference in sound quality?”
From my experience over the last few monthsI think the answer is yes. Though a lot of factors will determine how noticable the difference in the sound quality you can hear. We will look at these different factors in this article.
So What Is A HiFi Quality Audio Stream?
HiFi quality audio is any music stream or file that is at least the same quality as an audio CD. The Audio CD specification states that the digital music is sampled at 44Khz and with a data depth of 16 bits. It was designed as the optimal standard for digital music for human hearing.
So Why Do We Have Lower Quality Streaming?
During the 1990s we began to rip our music collection from CD’s onto our computers before transferring these files to our portable mp3 players such as the Apple iPod. The music we ripped or bought from online music stores were stored in MP3 or another Lossy compression. To reduce the size of each file so we could squeeze more files onto devices with limited storage capacity.
While the various lossy formats created small files. It came at a price some of the data from the original was lost. The various audio compression formats were designed not to be noticed by the listener.
When the first audio streaming services launched they continued to use lossy audio compression so that the music could be streamed at a lower bitrate. The highest quality MP3 can be streamed at 320Kbps while a CD-quality lossless compressed FLAC requires 1411 kbps.
As the number of people with fast Internet access has increased companies such as Tidal, Qobus and others began to offer lossless audio streaming at CD quality or higher. I myself only became aware of this last year when I set up my own Plex media server and ripped my CD collection afresh to the media library.
I have also tested Amazon HD for three months before last Christmas as part of a free trial.
What Are The Things That Might Prevent Me From Hearing The Difference?
The three factors that could prevent you from hearing the difference are described below.
What You Are Listening To.
Some tracks are mixed better then others. As you might think it is easier to notice the difference in sound quality in a track with better mixing.
Environment
Another factor for sound quality is the environment in which you are listening to music. This should come as no surprise, but listening to music in a noisy environment will have a negative impact on what you are listening to.
Equipment
All digital music is converted back to an analogue signal by an audio DAC. So it isn’t really surprising that the quality of the DAC will have an influence on sound quality. Some Audiophiles will tell you that you won’t hear the difference without an external DAC. I have listened to lossless CD-quality music on my Samsung Galaxy S9 mobile phone and I could hear a difference.
While I don’t think you need an external DAC. I would recommend that if you can afford one and regularly listen to music that you consider buying an external DAC. I have an iFi Zen Dac and I think it has really made a difference to all the music I listen to whatever the format.
Conclusion
So Yes, you will hear a difference.
I hadn’t considered this until I had started to write the conclusion that I hadn’t even considered the extra data bandwidth a lossless audio stream will use. If you are streaming music to a portable device or are worried about any data allowances. Or you have slow internet then I would stick with the lossy audio stream. Otherwise, use the Hi-Fi quality stream
If you found the article useful please like it below. You might also enjoy our introduction to digital music formats.