The 24-bit/192kHz versions are the highest quality files commonly available, and are identical to the studio master. Unlike MP3, which throws some content away to reduce file sizes, FLAC is lossless, and works like a computer zip file.

Lossy formats.

• MP3. MP3 (MPEG-1 Audio Layer III) is the most popular of the lossy formats.
• AAC. Advanced Audio Coding or AAC files (also known as MPEG-4 AAC), take up very little space and are good for streaming, especially over mobile devices.
• Ogg Vorbis.
• FLAC.
• ALAC.
• WAV.
• AIFF.
• DSD.

An audio format is a file format through which music is stored on your computer. There are a wide variety of formats, like wav, mp3, aiff, wma etc. To understand the difference between various formats, we need to first understand terms compressed and uncompressed formats.

What is the best audio format for sound quality? A lossless audio file format is the best format for sound quality. These include FLAC, WAV, or AIFF. These types of files are considered “hi-res” because they are better or equal to CD-quality.

AAC offers better quality than MP3 at the same bitrate, even though AAC also uses lossy compression. MP3 offers lower quality than AAC at the same bitrate.

AAC is a better codec, and can also either do a better job at the same bit rate, or an equivalent job at a lower bit rate. So the OPs question, which is better, MP3 at 320 or AAC at 256, is still an open question. 320 is absolutely not ALWAYS better.

While audio folks can be even wackier and geekier than computer folks (with a big snob element to boot), the consensus seems to be that AAC does a bit better than MP3 at the same bit rate. That’s the good news. The bad news is that the better your sound system, the worse it will sound, just like MP3s.

A higher bit rate is better, so a 256 kbps MP3 or AAC file is better than a 128 kbps file. However, with lossless files, this isn’t true. If you’re ripping music to a lossy format, it’s good to choose the iTunes default of 256 kbps, unless you need to cram a lot of music onto your portable devices.

When it comes to audio bitrate size does matter. The more kilobits per second the greater the quality of the sound. For most general listening 320kbps is ideal. Of course, CD-quality audio that stretches to 1,411kbps will sound better.

128 Kbps quality is typically considered radio quality, and a bit rate of 160 or higher is equivalent to CD sound quality. The music on iTunes is 256 kilobits per second. The higher the Kbps of an audio file, the more space it will consume on your computer. To maximize sound quality, 320 Kbps is the best choice.

Compared with AAC, FLAC offers better audio quality. Compared with FLAC, AAC has got more devices and media players support, including Apple devices and media players, like iPhone, iPad, iPod, etc and many non-Apple devices and media players, like Zune, PS3, Android, Blackberry, Wii, etc.

If you get FLAC and want to use Apple Lossless then the best option is to use a utility to convert directly between the two. There is no point converting AAC to Apple Lossless you don’t get any better quality than the original AAC.

I recommend using compression level FLAC-4. Going higher significantly increases encoding time with marginal improvement in file size reduction (mean reduction from FLAC-4 to FLAC-8 in this test is 1.2 % with a 182 % increase in mean compression time).

While FLAC files are up to six times larger than an MP3, they are half the size of a CD, and can have the same boost in audio quality. Furthermore, FLAC is not just restricted to 16-bit (CD quality), and you can buy files up to 24-bit/192kHz for another potential boost in performance.

The more bits and/or the higher the sampling rate used in quantization, the higher the theoretical resolution. This means 20-bit 96KHz recordings have roughly 33 times the resolution of a 16-bit 44.1KHz recording and a 24-bit 192KHz recording has roughly 256 time the resolution of a 16-bit 44.1KHz recording.

FLAC files can also provide a resolution of up to 32-bit, 96kHz, so better than CD-quality. Other lossless audio file formats include ALAC (Apple Lossless) and WMA Lossless (Windows Media Audio). The former is a good iOS and iTunes compatible alternative to FLAC, although the files are slightly less compact than FLACs.

FLAC files are generally ripped from CDs. They are “lossless,” which means no data is lost from the digital files on the CD. In other words, the quality should be about identical. A 128 bit rate is far from CD quality, but some untrained ears might not be able to tell the difference.

Sound Quality From a technical standpoint, digital CD audio quality is clearly superior to vinyl. CDs have a better signal-to-noise ratio (i.e. there is less interference from hissing, turntable rumble, etc.), better stereo channel separation, and have no variation in playback speed.

1,411 kilobits per second

There’s no question that CDs sound much better than MP3s. If you spring for Spotify Premium, you’ll still only have access to 320 kbps tracks, which is equivalent to MP3s. Tidal is one of the only streaming websites that streams in CD quality.

The mean lifetime for the disc population as a whole was calculated to be 776 years for the discs used in this study. As demonstrated in the histograms in Figures 18 and 19, that lifetime could be less than 25 years for some discs, up to 500 years for others, and even longer.

CDs can handle over 90 dB. In practical terms, this means that CDs have more than 10 times the dynamic range of LPs. Surface noise. Dust particles in the grooves of an LP cause crackles and ticks that are present and audible no matter how well you clean the record.

Up until now, Spotify has compressed audio down to a bitrate of 160 kbps on desktop or 96 kbps on mobile devices — Spotify calls this rate “normal.” Paid subscribers also have a “high quality” option of 320 kbps audio on desktop. High-fidelity or lossless audio has a significantly higher bitrate of 1,411 kbps.

Underwhelming sound quality while listening to music on Spotify is most likely a result of poor quality headphones, but maybe the equaliser settings in Spotify can help, at least a little. If you want to squeeze out some extra bass, mids, or treble, the equaliser settings in Spotify can help with that.

Apple Music, Spotify, TIDAL and other online stores/streaming services – 16-bit/44.1k WAV files.

The highest bitrate supported by the streaming platform is 320 kbps, which should be largely indistinguishable from lossless, but in most cases, the streaming app does not guarantee this playback quality.