I was just listening to an album in 24/96. I was playing via a WiiM Mini and saw the kbps were low for 24/96 at 2600kbps averaged across the album.
This equates to around 55 to 60% compression into FLAC. Based on what 24/96 should be uncompressed.
24/96 = 4,608 Kbps
This was on Qobuz.
I compared to Amazon Music, which was marginally higher. 60 to 62% compression into FLAC.
The album is only 16/44.1 on Tidal and came out at 582kbps which is around 42% compression into FLAC.
Apple Music unknown as played via Airplay 2.
If my math is correct, then I would consider these compression rates to be a lot lower than I was expecting. I checked with USB Audio Player Pro and got the same kbps figures.
Tidal claims it can do upto 9216kbps. I’m guessing this is 24/192 and no compression applied.
FYI - Qobuz 24/192 came out at 5201kbps.
Are we getting as good a sound quality as we think we are?
Should we be getting closer to the uncompressed figures.
Spotify is 320kbps
Just for ref: 24 bit, 96KHz, Stereo : 24 bits per sample x 96,000 samples per second = 2,304,000 bits per second x 2 channels = 4,608,000 bits per second of stereo.
4,608,000 bits per second = 4698kbps
If you calculate 1 kb = 1000 bits but I think you have to calculate 1024. In which case it’s 4500 kbps. But that does not matter much. The bigger issue is that your percentage calculation is off. 2600 is 56% of 4608, so 44% compression which is as expected. Not the other way around.
In any case, flac is the technology we have and Qobuz doesn’t have a magical version of flac that compresses more. Nor are they working with 22/92 source material or something when they say 24/96, I’m pretty sure. (Whether these bits below 16 are more than zeros is a different question, and I guess zeros would achieve higher compression rates, but that would be whatever the labels deliver, and we already know that not every so-called hires is really that, if it matters at all (probably not))
Time to go to bed and stop overthinking
With lossy compression that’s a completely different thing.
Yes, FLAC is lossless, and it’s compression ratio is configurable, see excerpt from Wikipedia
For user’s convenience, the reference implementation defines 9 compression levels, which are presets of the more technical parameters to the encoding algorithm. The levels are labeled from 0 to 8, with higher numbers resulting in a higher compression ratio, at the cost of compression speed. The meaning of each compression level varies by implementation.
to follow when I have some