https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/11/24175980/spotify-hifi-add-on-cost-extra-lossless-audio-supremium
Is HiFi almost here?
At ~17 USD a month, you could buy nearly every new song you like that you found that month in CD quality or better.
Start building your own library.
Never heard of qobuz before. What exactly is this Hi-Res and why is it more expensive than a CD?
Hi-res audio is up to 192kHz sampling, much higher than the 44.1kHz sampling of CDs (number of times per second the input soundwave is sampled), and a bit depth of 24bits, compared to CDs 16bit (value of the sample). This produces much larger file sizes, but also better definition to the sound of those songs. If you're listening on high quality audio equipment, you will notice this difference.
Yes, they are essentially the master files that would normally be downsampled to 16-bit fit on a standard CD. However, the audiophile industry is plagued by snake oil salesmen and relies heavily on the placebo effect to sell people fantastically overpriced equipment.
When the original engineers chose 44.1 KHz @ 16-bit as the CD standard, they did so because this allows the excess information that was originally recorded to be discarded without it impacting how it sounds to the human ear. If you are interested in reading an explanation of why there is every reason to be skeptical of hi-res audio, read this article by an engineer who worked on the FLAC and Vorbis digital audio formats.
Thank you for the explanation. Yes I'm sure that I won't hear a difference even though I have good headphones and speakers. I was just curious and didn't know they would have access to the master files
If you're interested, Qobuz has a free trial to their streaming subscription.
They don't have as good an interface as others or good recommendations, but the library is pretty good. Besides some more obscure stuff, they have everything I love.
And if you're interested in keeping stuff offline, there's a few Python scripts that use their API to download the high quality files. Makes it pretty trivial to make a library of offline, high-res music.
Apple Music stayed the same price and Tidal** lowered its Hi-Fi tier to match Apple's pricing. Fuck Spotify.
Spotify is absolutely the best advertising that competing services like Tidal could ask for. For the same cost as current Spotify (11$/mo) you can pump to Tidal for the same cost and get HiFi already! Bonus addition: you loose the superfluous non-music content that's slowly taking over at Spotify.