Lossless Listening Arrives on Spotify Premium
newsroom.spotify.comFour years after it was announced, not as high quality as the competitors, no sign of Atmos. You can see why they couldn't justify charging more for it.
Finally Spotify adds a feature I look forward to
The article says next month it will come to Sonos. That's ideal because those speakers are not Bluetooth; they're on your Wi-Fi.
Yeah but your smartphone can't play it without resampling it, and last I checked, your Bluetooth headpods can't play it without reencoding it.
Lossless streaming is a marketing ploy that wastes resources for no reason. High bitrate opus is better for streaming.
> smartphone can't play it without resampling, and Bluetooth without reencoding
Straight from the article that you could've read:
"For the smoothest and best listening experience, we recommend streaming lossless music on Wi-Fi using wired headphones or speakers on a non-Bluetooth connection, like Spotify Connect. Currently, Bluetooth doesn’t provide enough bandwidth to transmit lossless audio, so the signal has to be compressed before being sent."
I think there is value in having only one lossy encoding step on the way to my ears. And with all of the 4k video being streamed these days, lossless music bit rates are rather pedestrian, so I'm just not that concerned about the resources argument
If the audio is AAC and the Bluetooth headphones support that codec, it won't be reencoded.
AptX HD and LDAC at 990kbps are functionally lossless. AptX Lossless is, well, lossless.
I mainly use Spotify for listening to music while I work, on a desktop or laptop, with a good headset rather than ear-buds.
I keep my LG G8 around just to use its quad-DAC and wired headphones.
For wireless I have 2.4GHz earbuds using LC3 codec.