Streaming for Audiophiles - WSJ
On Feb. 22, streaming audio platform Spotify announced Spotify Hi-Fi, which will bring higher-resolution sound to its customers in select territories. The details of the offering -- pricing, where and when it will be available -- are still to come, but industry watchers have been speculating about the possibility of a higher-resolution offering from Spotify for several years.
CD-quality streaming became widely available in 2015, when Tidal launched Tidal Hifi, and platforms like Qobuz, Deezer and Amazon Music followed suit. Spotify announced their offering with a promotional video featuring singer Billie Eilish and her producer brother Finneas O'Connell discussing the power of high-resolution audio in the context of their work, explaining how their songs are filled with small but important details that can be obscured by inferior reproduction. "High-quality audio just means more info," Ms. Eilish says in the clip. "There's just things you will not hear if you don't have a good sound system."
Is she right? Ms. Eilish's 2019 album, "When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go?" -- written by the singer and her brother and produced by Mr. O'Connell -- is an intriguing mix of forceful bass and delicate voices, with Ms. Eilish's whispery vocals close to your ear and a low-end that massages your temples. A "good sound system" -- especially well-made speakers and headphones -- will render these elements with the requisite force and detail, but the precise role of higher-resolution audio in that process is harder to parse. Purely in terms of its sonic character, Spotify Hi-Fi, for most people, probably won't make much of a difference. Rather, the company's addition of the service is significant because it nods to the idea that quality matters and music is important, subtly reframing the platform as a tool for active rather than passive listening.
While one initial promise of streaming media was that it would replace the record collection, allowing each subscriber instant access to a massive and ever-expanding pool of music, it also created a new kind of radio. Streaming services differentiate between "lean back" listeners, who want to hit play and be served by music they like without going through the hassle of finding and selecting songs, and "lean in" listeners, who are actively engaged with each listening decision.
The "lean back" streaming listeners of today are analogous to radio listeners. While Spotify delivers music on demand, it's not necessarily there to be consumed carefully or critically. Last year, the company said that roughly two-thirds of the listening time on the service is spent on playlists, either those created by Spotify or by its users.
Since the introduction of the long-playing record in 1948, audiophiles have mostly turned to albums, as opposed to singles or the radio. This is the group that has been loudest in calling for Spotify to improve the resolution of its streaming offering. Spotify Hi-Fi will be of most concern to these committed album listeners, rather than the majority of those who are listening to playlists.
Will they hear a difference? If you've followed the ebb and flow of conversations among those who value high-quality sound, you know consensus about anything regarding quality is hard to come by.
And that's not to mention confusion regarding the terms "hi-fi" and especially "hi-res" when it comes to audio. With Spotify's announcement, "hi-fi" means "CD quality." Digital audio data is described in terms of its bit depth, which captures relative volume, and its sample rate, which captures frequency. The CD standard -- a bit depth of 16 and a sampling rate of 44.1kHz -- is described as "lossless," while compressed formats such as mp3 and Ogg Vorbis (the latter is used by Spotify) alter the data in favor of smaller files and are called "lossy." The degree to which these alterations are audible is a matter of some debate.
Some research, such as a 2009 study at Montreal's McGill University, suggests untrained listeners can't distinguish between digital files compressed at 320kbs, currently the highest Spotify setting, and CD files. A popular online quiz posted by NPR in 2015 found that a small but statistically significant number of users can identify uncompressed audio, though only 1% of respondents picked the highest-resolution file every time.
So it's reasonable to assume that a small percentage of people, if they have the right playback equipment, will hear the difference between Spotify Hi-Fi and lossy streaming at its highest setting. And perhaps two of those will be Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell, especially if they are listening to the music they made together. A larger percentage of people will only think they hear a difference, because their awareness of the quality of the file they are listening to informs their opinion of how it sounds. Still, if you are wired a certain way as a listener, the idea that you might be missing something can nag at you.
The most striking fact about latter-day discussions about sound quality and streaming may be just how far ahead of its time the compact disc was. In 1981, the year before the commercial release of the first CD, a man named Marc Finer, Sony's director of product communications, went from one record label to the next showing what the new technology could do. He carried with him a CD copy of an album by another Billy -- the 1978 LP "52nd Street," by a veteran singer-songwriter born William Joel. As relayed in Robert Barry's 2020 book "Compact Disc," Mr. Finer reported that the label heads were astonished by the clarity of the album's second track, "Honesty," when heard via this new system. Improbably, 40 years later, the technical standard in place during those playback sessions is, in streaming media, still considered state-of-the-art.
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Mr. Richardson is the Journal's rock and pop music critic.
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