You don’t have to invest in an expensive latest generation phone to enjoy lossless sound on a mobile phone: Android and iOS have been managing high quality uncompressed sound for years! All you need to do is use a compatible app.
Google’s announcement must have made some audiophiles smile. In a message published on USB, offering music lovers unparalleled sound quality. This was enough to astonish some uninformed observers, who rejoiced at the arrival of high-quality sounds on the new Google smartphones, suggesting that only these latest generation models could benefit from them. What is wrong ! Because everyone has long been able to listen to lossless audio on their mobile devices, without the need for a modern device and, above all, for free!
© Google-X (Twitter)
MP3 and AAC: the reign of destructive compressed audio
For an entire generation – mainly people from the 1990s onwards – music only exists in a compressed form. To be more precise, digital audio only exists in compressed form. This is the price of the success of formats such as MP3 or AAC, standards that have popularized the distribution of music in digital form on the Internet and on portable music players, and are now available for streaming and podcasts. All of these formats (MP3, AAC, OGG and even Dolby AC’3 for videos) have one thing in common: they are destructive. In fact, encoding involves removing information from the original signal to reduce the amount of data to be transmitted or stored. And this is also the case with Bluetooth, used for wireless speakers and headphones, which converts audio again into another destructive compressed format, which in turn changes the sound quality.
And it is precisely this destruction that enables more compact files. As it should be, this deletion of information is not accidental. Specific algorithms – rules – based on psychoacoustics are used to remove information that is considered useless or inaudible to the human ear. And it works very well: as long as the process isn’t too caustic, it’s difficult to distinguish a compressed copy from the original – especially if you’ve never heard it before! And most people are satisfied with the quality of compressed audio when listening to music via streaming platforms.
FLAC: the preferred format for audiophiles
In fact, only mildly trained ears prefer to hear music in its original quality, as recorded in the studio to create a master and then create audio CDs or vinyl records. And there are special formats for this, such as WAV or AIFF, which retain all signal information. The problem is that files of this type are “heavy”: without going into too many technical considerations, a 5-minute stereo recording in WAV takes up about 50 MB, while the equivalent compression in MP3 (128 bit/quality). s) is limited to 5 MB. Fortunately, there are also so-called lossless or non-destructive compressed audio formats that make it possible to reduce the data volume without deleting information and therefore affecting the sound quality: these are the famous formats. The best known is FLAC – its real name is Free Lossless Audio Codec – which is very popular among audiophile enthusiasts and is used by some music platforms. You can enjoy the highest quality without taking up too much space thanks to a compression rate of 30 to 70% compared to the original in WAV. This is clearly the format you should prefer if you want the best sound quality, especially since it is compatible with very high audio resolutions such as 24 bit – 96 kHz.
AIMP and VLC: free quality for everyone
The good news is that you don’t need much to enjoy it: just good headphones or good speakers. Because FLAC, which has been around since the early 2000s, has long been perfectly managed by operating systems, both on computers and on mobile phones. Android has recognized it since version 3.1 released in 2011 and iOS since version released in 2017. And there are many reading apps that manage this format just as well as traditional MP3: AIMP, Pulsar, Pi Player, foobar 2000, Stellio or even the essential VLC Player. Most importantly, all of these players are free and work on any smartphone!
© AIMP
Of course, to really benefit from the quality of FLAC – and generally lossless – it is essential to use wired speakers or headphones, as the protocols implemented in wireless transmissions are destructive. Especially since high-quality “old-fashioned” wired headsets are much cheaper than fashionable true wireless headphones, which are not always very faithful… This also applies to the new Pixel 8 and, more generally, to phones running Android 14. Because the new feature announced by Dave Burke clearly states that FLAC is now managed over USB – that’s the only real interest in this announcement. However, in practice, this does not represent an advantage, since it is better to use the digital-to-analog converters of the smartphone, especially if it is a mid or high-end model, than their counterparts built into the headphones. In short: with good analog headphones on the analog output and a playback app, everyone can already enjoy lossless quality on a phone or tablet…