Unleashing the Full Sound: Lossless Audio is Here!
I’ve got some exciting news about the sound quality of our streams! Since we launched, I’ve been gradually improving the audio, and we’ve now hit a major milestone: Lossless Audio!
Now, for those of you who aren’t tech wizards, let me break down what this means. When audio travels over the internet, it gets compressed, kind of like shrinking a file to make it easier to send. There are two main ways to do this: “lossy” and “lossless.”
“Lossy” compression is what you’re probably most familiar with. Think of it like a chef making a delicious soup but then straining out some of the ingredients. It still tastes great, but some subtle flavors might be missing. A common example is MP3. You’ve probably heard people say there’s no real difference in quality above a certain point, like 192kbps. That number (kilobits per second) basically tells you how much data is used to transmit one second of audio. We use a similar method (AAC at 192kbps) for our mobile app, because it gives a good balance of quality and data usage.
But if you’re listening on your home broadband, why settle for less? I totally agree – quality is king! That’s why we’ve been steadily increasing the bitrate (think of it as the “size” of the audio file) for our main stream. We bumped it up to AAC at 512kbps, which is a noticeable improvement over the mobile stream.
Interestingly enough, even I was surprised by how much of a difference it made. Someone even mentioned the stream sounding “brighter” recently, without knowing I’d made any changes! And when someone like Hardy Milts, who’s a real audio aficionado, notices the difference, you know you’re on the right track.
So, we’ve taken it a step further and gone “lossless”! This means we’re using a method called FLAC, which is like having the chef give you all the ingredients in the soup, no straining! It’s better than CD quality, and every single bit of audio information is preserved. Pretty cool, right?
Now, there are a couple of things we need to make sure of for this to work smoothly. First, our server has to be able to handle the extra data. We’re testing this over the next few weeks. If everything goes well, we’ll stick with lossless. If not, we’ll go back to the excellent AAC at 512kbps.
Second, the original audio files we play need to be top-notch. We’re working on upgrading our library to make sure everything is lossless where possible.
So, if you’ve got some good headphones, head over to our website and experience the super high quality of our lossless stream!
One last thing: I’ve also improved the audio quality on Alexa devices to AAC 512kbps, and I’m going to be testing lossless on my Echo Studio soon. If that works well, and the website stream is stable with FLAC, we’ll bring lossless to Alexa too!
Thanks for listening!
