I’m going to preface this with a (sometimes) controversial perspective: lossless music is overrated. Yes, it is technically the purest your music can get, and it’s worth buying lossless albums from sites like Bandcamp for the sake of posterity. But even on top-end speakers, it can be indistinguishable from some compressed tracks, and it comes with serious limitations. Mainly, it demands enormous amounts of bandwidth and storage — you may not be able to use your Bluetooth headphones.
With all that said, if you’re going to go lossless, you might as well go all the way. So which of the major streaming services in North America offers the best quality? Are they actually lossless in the first place? I should add that despite my title, I’m also including options like Amazon Music Unlimited in my roundup. It just doesn’t fit that well in a headline.
What qualifies as ‘lossless’ audio?
A quick primer on the tech
Lossless severely reduces the compression that’s been used since the earliest days of digital audio. Often, it’s been a necessity. I’m old enough to remember downloading MP3s over dial-up — it sometimes took hours to finish a single 128kbps (kilobits per second) song, never mind a whole album. Switching to a 3Mbps cable connection felt like a miracle.
Why does reducing or eliminating compression matter? The higher the compression, the lower the bitrate, which reduces the fidelity of output. A 128kbps file just can’t capture the nuances of a song in the same way as a 320kbps one can. There’s less dynamic range, so quiet details like overtones can go missing.
The bitrate of lossless files is ridiculously high. Whereas 320kbps is pretty much the maximum you’ll see for lossy tracks, lossless starts at around 1,411kbps for CD quality, and only rises from there. At the extreme, bitrates can top 3,000kbps — which would’ve completely maxed out that 3Mbps cable plan I had.
Whereas 320kbps is pretty much the maximum you’ll see for lossy tracks, lossless starts at around 1,411kbps for CD quality, and only rises from there.
There are three primary lossless formats at the moment. Chief among them is FLAC, since it’s both decades old and disassociated from any one company. It’s used by services like Bandcamp, Spotify, Tidal, Deezer, Qobuz, and Amazon Music Unlimited. The primary alternative these days is ALAC, short for Apple Lossless Audio Codec. Despite the name, it’s actually open-source and royalty-free. Indeed you’ll find it not just on Apple Music, but in some cases as an option for services like Tidal and Qobuz.
More rarely, you’ll find services offering WAV or AIFF. There’s not much incentive to use these formats anymore. While they’re fully uncompressed, that means they take up even more storage and bandwidth than something like ALAC or FLAC, without a measurable difference in fidelity. You might want these if you’re into audio production. Otherwise, they’re a massive headache. WAV in particular is missing support for the metadata and album art many of us take for granted.
Are the major streaming services actually lossless?
For all intents and purposes
If you browse online, you may encounter accusations that services like Spotify are pulling tricks to preserve their bandwidth. From a business perspective, they do have some incentive — infrastructure is pricey when you’re trying to serve millions of listeners every day. As lossless becomes more practical for consumers, that demand is liable to intensify dramatically.
So far, however, specs and real-world tests seem to back up the notion that we’re getting the real deal. Spotify, for instance, provides 24-bit, 44.1kHz FLAC. That’s slightly higher than CD quality, which is 16-bit. It’s not the absolute best you can get, but it does meet the definition of lossless, since there’s nothing lost versus physical media.
If you want the closest you’ll get to perfection, your main options are Apple Music, Tidal, and Amazon Music Unlimited.
If you want the closest you’ll get to perfection, your main options are Apple Music, Tidal, and Amazon Music Unlimited. All three of these are available up to 24-bit, 192kHz quality, which is well beyond what a CD player is capable of. You may be able to choose lesser lossless tiers in some circumstances if you want to have mercy on your devices and internet plan. Apple Music lets you dial back to 24-bit/48kHz, which I doubt anyone is complaining about.
A big asterisk here is that not every album may be mastered at the fidelity you want. Older titles were mastered for CD or vinyl, and may not have been remastered yet, assuming it’s even possible to clean them up. Decent source materials can be hard or impossible to track down. The less famous the artist, the more likely it is that original recordings have disappeared. And of course, it’s not like Elvis Presley was singing into digital mics in the first place.
There’s a conspicuous holdout in the North American streaming market: YouTube Music. That service’s audio tops out at just 256kbps, and there’s no sign that Google is about to take a leap forward anytime soon, despite spending billions on datacenters. 256kbps may be good enough for a gym session, a long drive, or a PEV ride, but you’ll probably notice the gap with other services when you’re sitting at home using better speakers and headphones.
Is lossless really overrated?
Think practically, not ideally
When you are streaming in your home office, or listening in your living room, you might as well turn on lossless if you’ve got compatible hardware and enough bandwidth. You might not notice the difference versus a 320kbps MP3 stream — but there’s no real harm being done, either. And who knows, you might be one of the lucky few blessed by genetics (and a lack of hearing damage) who can pick up on all those subtleties.
Otherwise, though, there’s a law of diminishing returns. Even Spotify’s lossless tech consumes about 1GB per hour, or a little over 1.4Mbps. That’s probably irrelevant on your home internet connection, but with a public hotspot or a flaky 4G or 5G signal, you could occasionally run into buffering problems. More significantly, any playlists you cache offline are going to swallow huge amounts of device space. My favorites playlist alone is over 206 hours. At lossless quality, there isn’t enough room on my 256GB iPad Pro, let alone my 128GB iPhone.
For now, it’s much simpler to stick with high-quality compression on a phone or tablet.
As I hinted in my intro, you also can’t listen to lossless over many Bluetooth headphones. There are newer codecs that enable this — such as aptX Lossless — but your headphones may not support them, in which case your only alternative may be something with a USB-C cable. If those codecs are present, the app and service you’re using still need to be compatible as well.
For now, it’s much simpler to stick with high-quality compression on a phone or tablet. It’s not even an option on smartwatches. This will change eventually, yet considering that 256GB and Bluetooth 6.x are only now becoming the new baseline for phones, it’s going to be a while before I’m rocking my entire music library in FLAC.
