Quantum Representation of Digital Audio

What Is Lossless Music? The term "lossless" was essentially created to be a foil — or to mean the opposite — of "compressed" or "lossy"; these are digital music files that have had a lot of their details, specifically their high and low frequencies, stripped away in order to save space on your smartphone or computer.

The term "lossless" doesn't mean uncompressed, however, but it refers to a type of compressed digital audio file that uses advanced data compression algorithms so that the audio track doesn't "lose" any detail in the compression process.

For context, the average size of a compressed audio file, like a MP3 or a AAC, is about 1/4 the size of its original recording. The average size of a lossless compressed audio file, such as FLAC or ALAC (Apple Lossless), is now a little more than 1/2 the size of its original recording.

When somebody refers to a "lossless" track, they typically mean that it's the same quality as a CD or vinyl record (16-bit/44.1 kHz). This was the highest resolution audio that many lossless streaming services (like Tidal, Deezer and Qobuz) offered for years, but many of them now offer ever higher resolution audio files, which are also a type of lossless music.

For example, Tidal gives its HiFi subscribers the option of listening to Master Quality Authenticated (MQA) certified tracks (up to 24bit/96kHz), while Amazon Music HD gives its subscribers the ability to listen to "Ultra HD" (up to 24-bit/192kHz).

Max resolution: Every lossless streaming service is capable of streaming CD quality (16-bit/44.1 kHz) audio, but that's really the bare minimum requirement. A lot of lossless streaming services now offer significantly higher-resolution tracks that are Master Quality Authenticated (MQA, up to 24bit/96kHz) or "Ultra HD" (up to 24-bit/192kHz).

Price: When Apple released a lossless tier of Apple Music at no extra cost, it definitely disrupted the existing lossless streaming market. In fact, every one of them was forced to lower its base price from between $15 —$20 to around $10 (which is the cost of Apple Music). However, most lossless streaming services charge more than $10 for lossless streaming, that's higher than CD quality. These more premium plans also can great you access to more features, like live concerts and discounts if you want to purchase certain lossless tracks.

Improving Audio Compression Audio compression is an essential process in music production and distribution, as it allows for smaller file sizes and faster streaming. However, current compression algorithms can lead to a loss of sound quality. Quantum computing could potentially be used to develop more efficient compression algorithms that preserve sound quality while reducing file sizes. The parallel processing power of quantum computing could be particularly useful in this application. By simultaneously processing large amounts of data, quantum computers could potentially identify and eliminate redundancies in the audio data that are not perceptible to the human ear.

Music production and sound engineering are areas that have greatly benefited from advancements in technology, and I believe quantum computing has the potential to revolutionize these fields.

A quantum analogue of data compression has been demonstrated for the first time in the lab. Physicists working in Canada and Japan have squeezed quantum information contained in three quantum bits (qubits) into two qubits.

Compression of classical data is a simple procedure that allows a string of information to take up less space in a computer’s memory. Given an unadulterated string of, for example, 1000 binary values, a computer could simply record the frequency of the 1s and 0s, which might require just a dozen or so binary values. Recording the information about the order of those 1s and 0s would require a slightly longer string, but it would probably still be shorter than the original sequence.

Quantum data are rather different, and it is not possible to simply determine the frequencies of 1s and 0s in a string of quantum information. The problem comes down to the peculiar nature of qubits, which, unlike classical bits, can be a 1, a 0 or some “superposition” of both values.

A user can indeed perform a measurement to record the “one-ness” of a qubit, but such a measurement would destroy any information about that qubit’s “zero-ness”. What is more, if a user then measures a second qubit prepared in an identical way, he or she might find a different value for its “one-ness” – because qubits do not specify unique values but only the probability of measurement outcomes.

“This way you can store the qubits until you know what question you’re interested in,” says Aephraim Steinberg of the University of Toronto. “Then you can measure x if you want to know x; and if you want to know z, you can measure z – whereas if you don’t store the qubits, you have to choose which measurements you want to do right now.”

As a premium user of Pandora, if you listen to music for 1h, you will use 86.4mb per hour

Another monster sneaking on your data… The iHeartRadio music streaming service offers a 128kbps bitrate option. That’s the only option. That equals to 57.6mb. Just like in the case of Pandora.

The battle to become the best music streaming service when it comes to offering hi-res streams is well and truly underway. Gone are the days when all a streaming platform had to do was offer up low-quality Ogg Vorbis or MP3 streams and make you endure a few ads for the privilege.

Today, the key to victory is ad-free, hardware-supported streaming in high-resolution audio quality – and, crucially, for the best price.

So where does the arrival of these newer, competitively priced hi-res services leave Tidal and Qobuz, and even services not in the hi-res game (Deezer 'only' offers CD quality, and the delay of Spotify HiFi leaves the world's most popular streaming service with some of the poorest-sounding streams)?

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.

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.

The highest quality MP3 has a bitrate of 320kbps. A 24-bit/192kHz file takes that to 9216kbps. Music CDs are 1411kbps – remember, they're your starting marker for hi-res.

Although hi-res audio songs and albums have been available to download for several years now, streaming hi-res audio is relatively new across popular music subscription platforms – and some still don't offer it.

While the terms 'lossless' and 'hi-res' may be used in close connection – Apple Music has launched Lossless and Hi-Res Lossless labels and, to complicate matters further, Amazon Music prefers the terms HD and UHD when referring to its more premium audio offerings – music that is 'lossless' is not always hi-res.