Deezer, a 7-year-old French company that competes with Spotify and other streaming music services around the globe, is coming to the United States at last. But the US version of Deezer’s service has a twist: it’s a premium offering aimed at audiophiles, and for starters, you’ll need a Sonos speaker system to try it out. Deezer Elite, which launches Sept. 15th, will stream tracks from Deezer’s catalog of 35 million songs in 16-bit FLAC. FLAC files are similar to MP3s, but they’re lossless, meaning that the song’s audio quality is not degraded despite being compressed. Spotify, by comparison, streams at a maximum of 320 kbps; Deezer says Elite songs stream at five times the quality. […] At launch, Deezer Elite will be available exclusively through
Sonos — at a nice discount. You can try the service for $9.99 if you commit to a year, or $14.99 a month otherwise. The company won’t say exactly how many songs are on Elite; instead, [Tyler Goldman,U.S. CEO] says 90 percent of the songs that have been played on Deezer will be available in 16-bit FLAC. The company plans to bring Elite to more platforms over time, along with the regular version of Deezer. – Casey Newton,
The Verge