High quality audio is picking up the pace. We reviewed Tidal last year and loved it, and just yesterday Onkyo announced a new lossless and high-resolution service.
Today it's Deezer's turn - the company which launched a similar lossless and high-resolution streaming service in the US last year is now launching it in the UK.
The first bit of good news is that music is a minimum of CD quality, although Deezer hasn't said what percentage will be at this rate, and how many tracks will be higher quality. Like Onkyo and Tidal, FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) is used to deliver the audio over the internet.
FLAC is good because it doesn't reduce the quality, but does make the file sizes smaller - crucial for internet delivery. Deezer's library is now some 35 million songs in size, so there's plenty of choice too.
Deezer says that it gained 200,000 new subscribers since the service launched in the US in September. The company also says that 65% of the customers it asked would never go back to regular MP3s.
The sound of Sonos
Of course the bad news is that anyone who doesn't use a Sonos system will be excluded - at least for now. This seems odd, given the success that Tidal has had with its multi-platform service, but it's very possible that a fully-fledged service will launch at some point later this year.
Current customers will get the service at no additional cost. In March there will be a 30 day trial for new customers to get to grips with the service and the company will announce the final pricing then too.
Deezer's regular quality offering costs £9.99 and its US Elite service is $19.99, so we'd hazard a guess you'll be looking at £19.99 here - the same as Tidal.
