A few weeks ago Apple announced they'll offer users the ability to stream
lossless audio through Apple Music. In this video,
you'll learn what lossless audio is and why it's taken us so long to reach this point.
But if this is our first time meeting, my name is Kyle. Welcome to Audio University.
Before we get started, I want to touch on a very important distinction. There's a
difference between dynamic range compression and data compression. Throughout the process of mixing
a song, a mixing engineer might use dynamic range compression to reduce the difference between the
loudest and quietest parts of a signal. And this is completely different from data compression,
which is the topic I'm covering in this video. Data compression is the process of
reducing the size of an audio file while still trying to preserve the quality of the signal.
It's really important that we keep these two concepts separated.
There are three basic types of audio file formats: uncompressed, lossless, and lossy. Let's compare
the drawbacks and the benefits of each of them. Uncompressed audio files are exactly what you
might guess. They're not compressed. The most common uncompressed file format in audio is a .WAV
file. They tend to take up a lot of space and have historically been very difficult to stream over
the Internet. For every second of uncompressed CD-quality audio, there's approximately 1600 bits
of data! These days, hard drive space and Internet bandwidth are more accessible than ever before.
But of course, it hasn't always been that way. When the original iPod was first released in 2001,
it had only 5 GB of storage capacity, which would theoretically only hold about 160 songs
at CD-quality - not very impressive by today's standards. This is where lossy audio compression
was helpful. By compressing the data in a .WAV file, audio files became much smaller.
You could fit 1000 compressed songs on that same 5 GB of hard drive space, which was much more
enticing to consumers at the time. But the storage space saved with that data compression came at a
cost. Any data compression format that discards data is considered a lossy format. The most
common lossy audio formats are .MP3 and .AAC. In an attempt to make the file size smaller,
the audio is processed through a compression codec. Now the information that's discarded isn't
just randomly selected. There are special codecs that process the audio and discard the least
important data based on human perception of sound. By the way, Ian Corbett wrote a great article for
Sound On Sound that will help you learn more about this process. He can explain it much better than
I can, so I'll just put a link to the article in the description below. Lossy compression paired
with the growing capabilities of the Internet and cellular technology have made it possible for us
to stream music and other media over the Internet. So rather than waiting several minutes for a
single song or album to download, we can now watch what we want, when we want, on demand. This has,
of course, changed the music industry forever. But that's another topic for another video.
Lossless compression formats reduce the size of the file without destroying data. This means that
they can be decoded and reconstructed without any loss in quality! Although lossless files are
smaller than the original uncompressed version, they're still much larger than a highly compressed
lossy file and up until recently only a few companies have offered lossless audio streaming,
such as Tidal, Deezer, and Qobuz. But with Apple's recent announcement, we might start to see
even more companies offering lossless audio to listeners who care about audio quality.
Even though current technology is certainly capable of providing lossless audio streaming,
most people don't seem to mind listening to lower-quality lossy audio. Is that because there
isn't a noticeable difference or have we just grown accustomed to lower-quality audio as time
has gone on? Well in my opinion, it's a little bit of both. First, there's no doubt that we've grown
accustomed to lower-quality audio over time. When the delivery format of mainstream music changed
from vinyl and CD to .MP3, it was a big shift for the worse. And while a small percentage of people
still listen on high fidelity audio systems, most of us listen on tiny earbuds or Bluetooth
speakers. By the way, Bluetooth only supports lossy audio, even if you are listening to a
lossless file. On the other hand, lossy audio doesn't necessarily mean poor-quality audio.
It's important to take into account that the bit rate of the file or the stream
greatly impacts the sound quality. Let's take a look at the quality settings offered by Spotify.
Setting the quality to "Low" in the Spotify app will provide a bit rate of approximately
24 kilobits per second. Most people who care about audio quality will be able to easily
identify the difference between a 24 kilobits per second in .MP3 and an uncompressed file. However,
Spotify and most other streaming providers already offer 256 or 320 kilobits per second audio, which
is significantly better. Honestly, I think most people (myself included) would really struggle
to hear the difference between a 256 kilobits per second .MP3 and an uncompressed audio file.
If you're up for a challenge, check out the link in the description to an NPR
article that consists of several tests that you could run right in your web browser. Let us
know the results of your test in the comments below. Honestly, I think you'll be surprised.
I think we tend to focus too much on some things like lossy versus lossless,
while completely ignoring other more important things like speaker placement and alignment.
Simply placing your speakers in the correct position will almost certainly improve audio
quality more than switching streaming services to get lossless audio. I want to give you a gift for
making it this far in the video. It'll help you to set up your system correctly to optimize sound
quality no matter what you're listening to. You can download a free speaker placement guide at
audiouniversityonline.com/speaker-placement-guide/.
If you like this video, hit the "Like" button and do me a favor - share it
with somebody else you think would find it interesting. I'll see you in the next video.