The world’s biggest music service may be popular, but it doesn’t exactly cater to the best sound quality. But that looks to change this year.
The moment you pay for music services, you typically get a better quality than the free offerings they have. Take Spotify and YouTube Music, with the free versions being supported by ads, but also typically the sound quality being a little lower than what you get if you pay.
Pay for a music service and the quality goes up, with Spotify delivering a quality better than most MP3s you might have had in the past, and it’s much the same at the other music services, as well, whether its Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon, or the like.
But if you’re living in Australia, there aren’t a whole lot of options if you want a CD-quality service, with Tidal HiFi more or less providing the higher resolution of a 16-bit CD, plus a little more in the 24-bit world, as well.
And that’s an area Spotify could join in later this year, as it announced Spotify HiFi will be coming later this year in select markets.
Announced at Spotify’s “Stream On”, Spotify HiFi will support CD-quality lossless audio, and play nicely with speakers designed to work with Spotify Connect, which means the more impressive speakers out there that can already be controlled by Spotify should talk to Spotify’s high-res service when it’s launched.
Spotify hasn’t said whether the service will include 24-bit tracks as well as the 16-bit CD-quality tracks, but given Tidal already competes here, as well as Deezer and Amazon’s music service in America (Amazon’s HD service is not in Australia at the present time), there’s a chance Spotify HiFi will include both 16- and 24-bit by the time it launches.
As to when Spotify HiFi will launch in Australia, that’s another story altogether, but it appears that it might be on the cards, so you really only need to keep an ear out for better quality sound in the future.
