GADGET GURU

T3's tech superstar hears your requests and cranks up the advice

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Q What's all the excitement about lossless music?

The contemporary excitement is down to Spotify’s long-overdue concession to providing its customers with high-resolution audio.

In this case, it’s better-than-CD 24-bit/44.1kHz FLAC across almost its entire library. Very nice, though Guru does suspect that more artist-friendly rivals such as Qobuz might start to pick up speed as Spotify’s reputation takes a long-overdue dip in the mud.

GaGu does suppose that your question might have been more about lossless music in general, rather than why it’s in the news, so let’s tackle that. You probably already know that many popular formats are compressed to save space and bandwidth. A CD holds just over 700MB of data; turning that into MP3 files isn’t simply a case of applying a magic algorithm. Bits get sliced out. Details are smoothed away. That's loss. Lossless formats, then, give music enough room to breathe.

They don’t squash anything, they present the tunes - as far as a digital recreation can - in the exact form they were recorded and mastered. But let’s make one thing very clear: Guru maintains a collection of entirely legitimate FLACs out of principle alone. He cannot actually tell the difference between compressed and lossless tunes in any meaningful way.

We're not talking magic beans or the contents of your average audiophile’s panic room here, but don't go looking at lossless as some kind of musical panacea. It’s nice, but by no means essential. Sort of like HDR for your ears.

Do I really need that new super-skinny phone?

Need? Do you need anything more than food, water, shelter and a perpetual subscription to T3? No.