What’s your favorite way to listen to music? Maybe you prefer a quiet room with some headphones or listening on vinyl. One thing is for sure, you don’t want to hear some compressed MP3 on your phone, right? Apple, Amazon, and Tidal offer “lossless audio,” claiming users can “hear the exact same thing” an artist created in the studio. However, it’s a myth that lossless audio objectively sounds better than MP3, and most users can’t hear a difference at all.
The term “lossless audio” also casts a shadow on MP3s, which sound like they’ve lost something. Technically, they have lost a lot of data, but compressed files are pulling away frequencies that humans largely can’t hear. Apple started offering Lossless Audio at WWDC 2021. It was likely doing this to steal some audiophiles back from Amazon Music, which added lossless music back in 2019, or Tidal, which was the first to offer it in 2014.