He has only brought him the frying of 8 years, but he is here; or almost. Spotify has announced that, finally, it will improve the sound quality on its platform with a new option of lossless audio (lossless). Against the rumored on previous occasions -from 2017 it comes with the subject -this improvement does not imply a new subscription plan, but will reach all accounts users Premium in more than 50 countries throughout the next two months. If you are a premium subscriber, you are in luck, but not so much if you use some Bluetooth headphones.
This circumstance is, today, the most common. For years, the market management is what is and users prefer the comfort of wireless headphones than the superior quality – according to model, obviously – and practicality – notice of waiting to be connected to the mobile – of the headphones with a lifetime cable. For that reason, the connector 3.5 mm jack It has practically disappeared from mobile phones and only continues to be found in low -end terminals. If you have a premium phone of thousands of euros, in audio you are limited to the quality that Bluetooth allows.
What is lossless audio or spotify lossless
Spotify has always used formats that compress sound for retransmission. In the app, use compression format OGG Vorbis with a maximum quality of 160 kbps For free accounts and 320 kbps For Premium. In the web version, the format is AAC and maximum quality 128 kbps and 256 Kbpsrespectively.
The Kbps They are a measure that is used for audio with losses; that is, in which quality is lost in relation to the original source when digitizing music and compressing it. In it lossless audiowhich contains all the original information, the thing is measured in Bits and KHz. A CDfor example, has a quality of 16-bit/44.1 kHz. The bits determine the dynamic range and the KHz the frequency and detail range.
The quality offered by Spotify without losses is 24-bit/48 kHzsuperior to that of a CD. With hi-fi sound and since there is no compression-which always implies data loss-the sound is clearer, with a greater dynamic range and you can capture all the sound details of the original recording.
Why don’t Bluetooth headphones for audio lossless
Logically, this has to be accompanied by speakers or headphones at the height and this is where we find the problem with wireless headphones. Bluetooth does not have enough bandwidth to transmit all the information of an uncompressed file format – the spotify lossless- or WAV.
When a cable headset is used, the Dac From the mobile he has already done his job before the audio travels through the cable. The DAC (Digital-To-Analog Converter) is the component that converts the digital audio signal into analogical so that it can be reproduced by the headphones. When we use Bluetooth headphones, they do the DAC of these.
Thus, what leads the cable to the headphones is An electrical signal that does not have that limitation of the bandwidth of the wireless and can transmit the audio with all the original recording information. For this reason, cable headphones are necessary to appreciate the lossless audio format.