Spotify is on the verge of offering higher-quality lossless audio streaming, but for most people the drawbacks outweigh the theoretical improvement in sound.

Most music streaming services, Apple Music, Tidal, etc., already offer a lossless streaming option, which delivers a version of the catalog that is identical to what would have been the canonical CD version in the past. Some music streamers are taking it a step further and offering audio files that use the same quality that the musicians used when composing and recording their songs. Now Spotify is finally about to jump on the bandwagon, but honestly, can anyone really tell the difference?

"[Can] the average listener really tell a difference between compressed audio and lossless on typical Bluetooth speakers or headphones? In my experience, probably not in most cases. The limitations of those playback devices and signal transmission tend to negate many of the theoretical benefits of lossless high-resolution audio files," Harrison Alley, founder of Student of Guitar, told Lifewire via email.

First, some numbers. Audio files have two relevant numbers. For example, CD quality has a sample rate of 44.1 kHz at a bit depth of 16 bits. That bit depth is the level of precision or detail that can be resolved, and the sample rate is a bit like the frames per second of a movie, only much, much faster.