You may have already gathered that ‘lossless audio’ generally represents higher quality audio than you may be used to. That is what it is being sold as anyway, and if you have spent many years listening to lossy MP3s and streaming services, that could well be the case. But you are just as likely to have heard of ‘hi-res audio’ too. So what is lossless audio exactly? What is the difference between lossless and lossy, and how does lossless compare with hi-res?
WHAT IS LOSSLESS AUDIO?
Whether an audio file or stream is lossless or lossy or uncompressed (it has to be one of those three) depends on whether it has been compressed and, if it has been, how it has been compressed.
Compression is used to make an audio file/stream smaller in size and therefore more practical to store or handle. A compressed stream typically demands less internet bandwidth and the file requires less storage than an uncompressed one. The problem is that the compression process can discard some audio data so that you aren’t getting all (and in many cases, quite a lot) of the information in the original audio recording, and therefore the original quality.
Essentially, uncompressed audio (typically stored as WAV and AIFF formats) is an exact reproduction of the original studio recording, where lossless and lossy audio files are compressed. But lossless audio (typically stored as ALAC and FLAC formats) is compressed for practicality but in a way that doesn’t lose any information and so shouldn’t affect sound quality, whereas lossy audio (typically stored as MP3 and AAC formats) is more heavily compressed for the easiest transport/storage and does lose information in the process.
LOSSLESS VS HI-RES AUDIO
Lossless audio is typically accepted as being 16-bit/44.1kHz – which is the bitrate (16) and sample rate (44.1kHz) of CD music files. So, ‘lossless’ quality may be what you have listened to for much of your life (and downgraded from, as you adopted streaming). That is why you will often see ‘CD quality’ and ‘lossless’ presented as one and the same. It’s important to note that ‘lossless’ is the term streaming services have chosen to label their CD-quality streams to stand them apart from their lower-quality streams and, if they have them, their hi-res streams; technically any recordings packaged losslessly, e.g. in FLAC and ALAC, are lossless.
It is widely accepted that ‘hi-res quality’ is audio that has a bitrate and/or sample rate above CD (‘lossless’) quality. So hi-res audio can be 16-bit/96kHz or 24-bit/44.1kHz audio, though the most common hi-res audio qual
