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Obviously, this affects the sound quality. This 'lossy' compression means that certain data is scrapped in the encoding process for the sake of convenience and smaller file sizes. Until Spotify Hi-Fi arrives, all streams from Spotify use compressed file formats with relatively low bitrates, such as 320kbps Ogg Vorbis streams on Spotify Premium. In numbers, it's a jump from 96dB to 144dB, which is huge. Going from 16 to 24 bits results in a massive increase in dynamic range, which is the gap between the quietest and loudest sounds that can be captured. The first number is bit-depth, which indicates the number of 'bits' of information present in each sample of the signal. The higher the sampling rate, the more times the audio signal has been sampled, and thus the more detail resolution you get. Sampling rate – the second number – refers to the number of times per second that the wave is measured during the analogue-to-digital conversion process. So what do the numbers mean? It might help to think of an audio signal as a sound wave being plotted on a graph. So a hi-res file can be 24-bit/44.1kHz, where bit-depth is higher than CD quality but the sampling rate is the same, and vice versa.
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First things first, should you care about hi-res streaming? High-resolution (often shortened to 'hi-res') audio is a term used to describe music files that have a higher sampling frequency and/or bit depth than that of CD quality, which is specified at 16-bit/44.1kHz.
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