Chances are you’ve heard of the concept of ” lossless audio ” before, and those who claim to be audiophiles often talk a lot about the FLAC format being much better than regular MP3. In this article we are going to tell you what lossless audio is, how it differs from the tablet and of course whether or not you notice the difference when listening to it.
Before we go into assessing what is better or worse, let’s first start with the basic concepts that are none other than defining what exactly lossless audio is and how it differs from compressed audio.
What are Lossless Audio and Compressed Audio
Many times you have heard the concept of “compressed MP3 audio”, and it is indeed that when we deal with digital audio, it is compressed so that it takes up less storage space on our digital devices. Of course, compressing the audio implies limiting the size and shape of the wave that makes up the acoustic signal, so certain values of its frequency range are omitted and, therefore, losses occur.
As you can see in the image above, lossless audio (FLAC) has many more nuances than compressed audio (MP3) in which losses occur in the interest of saving storage space. A comparison can be, for example, analog audio compared to digital: in digital, the audio signal must be converted to the binary system, of ones and zeros, and therefore certain nuances and tones that persist in analog audio are lost. .
In its purest form, lossless audio refers to uncompressed audio, plain and simple. According to Gilad Tiefenbrun, CEO of the hi-fi sound equipment company, ” Lossless audio is the unmodified output of the recording process; it is the most accurate representation of the output of the recording process that exists.”
Lossless compression
The open source lossless format FLAC, Apple Lossless (ALAC), and APE audio files are examples of lossless compression formats, all of which manage to compress file size but without losing overall audio quality. Obviously, the level of compression or saving of digital space that files occupy is not as great as in lossy files, such as MP3.
What is generally understood by a lossless compressed file is the direct copy of the studio recording, reduced in size for lower bandwidth transmission and later reconstituted while preserving all the musical information of the original recording. It is something very similar to a ZIP compressed file, where a complex document is compressed into a smaller container to transport it to another site, where it is decompressed and restored to its original format.
These file formats are therefore a delivery mechanism; they use compression algorithms to remove silence from the soundtrack, but what they don’t do is compress the actual sound or remove any data. This is what differentiates them from compressed audio files such as MP3, where it does cause loss as it eliminates data.
Audio formats (compressed or not)
In the lossy files, there is some of the data that is discarded as we have already explained. Lossy formats are very common on streaming music services like Spotify or Pandora and are the preferred format by iTunes or Amazon. A small file size makes it easy to download as well as to store it on various portable devices, such as a smartphone. These are the most common lossy audio formats that we can find:
- AAC : Advanced Audio Coding or MPEG-4. It is a lossy compressed file format used by iTunes to store your downloads to easily stream audio.
- MP3 : Moving Picture Experts Group, is the most popular of the lossy formats. The MP3 algorithm performs audio compression by eliminating in the tracks those parts or frequencies that cannot be easily appreciated by the human ear.
- OGG Vorbis – An open source lossy compressed format popular on Spotify and other streaming services to save bandwidth.
- WMA : Windows Media Audio files are Microsoft’s proprietary lossy compressed codec. They are unique in that they can contain multi-channel surround sound data.
Let’s now look at the types of lossless files that we can find, also known as Hi-Res or high resolution. These formats preserve all the information of the original study where the recording is completely preserved when it is processed and stored digitally. Lossless files provide the highest quality and above all audio fidelity; however, these uncompressed files are relatively large, which means that they take up much more disk space.
- FLAC : Free Lossless Audio Codec, is the most common lossless audio compression format for music downloads. It is open source and has embedded metadata (artist name, etc.). FLAC files are usually half their original size, although Apple iTunes does not support this format.
- ALAC : Apple Lossless Audio Codec, it is like FLAC but developed by Apple and, curiously, it is also open source.
- AIFF : Audio Interchange File Format, is an uncompressed format used by Apple, although it can also be played on most PCs.
- WAV : Waveform Audio Format, is the most common and most used uncompressed format, and in fact it is the one used in the professional industry to record original audio in studios. They have the particularity that their maximum size is 2 GB per file.
Can you tell a difference when using lossless audio?
Let’s take the most common example (or the most discussed dispute), FLAC audio and MP3 audio. The first involves lossless compression and its quality is equivalent to that of WAV, while as we have explained before, the audio in MP3 is compressed to save space and it does have losses, since the MP3 compression method implies cutting the signal in the Frequencies that the human ear generally cannot perceive (as a general rule around 16-18 KHz, the cut-off already occurs, although this depends on the bit rate at which the compression has taken place).
The reality is that in a normal stereo, with normal devices and listened to by a normal person, it is extremely difficult to perceive any difference. However, if you have high-end equipment and professional headphones it is quite likely that you will be able to discern a certain difference in some nuances of the audio, but since MP3 is compressed practically within the limits of human hearing, almost no person you will really notice the difference.
Now, if we submit both files to the spectrometer and measure the wavelengths then we will see clear differences, but when it comes to the perception of the human being, we can affirm that there is no significant difference. So, don’t be fooled by saying that FLAC audio is better than MP3: it is actually technically better, but when push comes to shove, you won’t notice any difference.
