The more trials you do, the more statistically significant your results are. There are five tracks, for each of which you’ll have to complete 5, 10, or 20 trials, depending on how much time you have to kill. They’re randomized, and you don’t know which clips are lossless or not you just have to pick whether A or B is identical to X. The link above compares Spotify’s 320 kbps streaming against a lossless file, so it should be equivalent to comparing Spotify’s Premium and HiFi tiers. In this test, the goal is to match one of two clips (A or B) to a reference clip (X). There are plenty of blind tests out there to help you compare lossless audio with ‘lossy’ audio formats, but I like the Digital Feed ABX test, initially created to test whether listeners could tell the difference between Tidal’s lossless audio and lossy compressed music. So before you get your wallet out for the promise of higher quality audio, why don’t you actually put your hearing to the test? Test your hearing Still, many golden-eared audiophiles will swear they can hear a difference without evidence. Simply believing that a certain upgrade or key specification will make your speakers or headphones sound better is often more likely to cause to an ‘improvement’ than any actual change.

Our hearing is subject to a whole lot of placebo.

Although at low bitrates the differences between lossy and lossless audio can be quite obvious, I’m willing to bet most people can’t tell apart a lossless file from a 256 kbps MP3 one - let alone a file compressed with the more modern Ogg codec that Spotify uses. Spotify Premium (the existing, $9.99 ad-free tier) already streams at a maximum of 320 kbps (256 kbps on the web) if you’ve enabled this in the app’s settings. After all, the vast majority of listeners do not have the hearing ability to tell the difference between lossless audio and music that is compressed at a high enough quality. It’s unsurprising, then, that most services turn to lossy compression.

Spotify hifi upgrade