What Is Lossless Audio, and Do You Really Need It?

There is a difference, Of course, between “putting on some music” and “listening to music”. The first is a good way to disturb the peace while you do some work or other tasks, while the second is a way to take you into a world of emotions and expression. And so it follows that while the first does not require extraordinary levels of quality to be effective, the second benefits from sounding as close as possible to the artist’s original intentions. For digital music, this is lossless audio.

You may have heard more about lossless audio recently, thanks to the growing number of music streaming services that offer it as part of their subscriptions, most recently Spotify. But what exactly is lossless audio, how do you get it, and does it really matter? Let’s join in.

What is lossless audio?

At the risk of stating the obvious, lossless audio is digital audio that has not lost any of the information originally present in the recording. This doesn’t mean it hasn’t been compressed – both lossless and “lossy” files will have gone through the compression process to ensure the digital file is of a manageable size to stream reliably. It is the size of the file after compression that defines whether it is lossless or not – and there are two numbers relevant here.

The first is the “sampling rate”, which is the number of samples per second of the analog audio signal as it is being converted to digital information. The higher the sampling rate, the more precise the digital information must be – for example, a compact disc has a sampling rate of 44.1 kHz, which means that the analog signal is sampled 44,100 times per second when converted to digital.

Next, there is “bit depth”, which represents how much of an analog sound wave each sample of the signal is capturing. The higher the number here, the greater the scrutiny of the analog audio signal, and the more accurate the transcription of information from analog to digital. It also helps provide greater dynamic range, which is the distance between the quietest and loudest moments in the recording. Compact discs use 16-bit audio.

The 16-bit/44.1 kHz resolution used by compact discs was accepted at the time of the technology’s development as the best compromise between capturing as much data as possible and keeping digital audio files at a manageable size for the human ear. And this holds – any digital audio file with a resolution of at least 16-bit/44.1 kHz can be described as lossless, as long as it is stored in a lossless format such as FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) or, indeed, on a compact disc. Anything less than this – often expressed differently in kbps – can be safely called “lossy”, while anything larger takes us into the realm of “high-resolution” audio (which is ultimately anything higher than CD quality, but is generally considered to be anything with 24-bit bit depth or greater).

Is lossless audio better than regular audio?

Short answer: yes. After all, information is knowledge, and knowledge is power – or, in this example, knowledge is having access to as much audio information as possible, which keeps your music true to the artist’s intent.

Slightly longer answer: Yes, as long as you are using a tool that is capable of revealing all the information contained in a lossless audio file, then it will sound better* than its lossy counterpart. This means everything from the source of your music, to how well the digital information is converted to analog, its amplification, and finally, the speakers or headphones that deliver it to your ears.