Tim Jonze, the Guardian’s music editor, Jason Phipps, the Guardian’s head of audio, and I sat down in Graham’s Hi-Fi in London’s Islington to listen to a variety of tracks, each in four formats: 128kbps and 320kbps MP3 CD and 24-bit studio master. With that debate out the way, do hi-res studio master tracks actually sound any different or better than MP3s or CDs? The studio master is something Young and his Pono player and music service has embraced and is likely to become the true mark of what is and isn’t hi-res music. Is CD hi-res? Perhaps a high-quality MP3? Or does it have to be 24-bit music? For us, hi-res music is the 24-bit studio master - the original recording the artist made, from which all other files and formats are made.” As Linn’s managing director Gilad Tiefenbrun explains, “there’s confusion over what is and isn’t hi-res music. There is even debate what actually constitutes hi-res. The term “hi-res” will be bandied around more and more in the coming months as electronics manufacturers build branded support for higher quality music into smartphones, tablets and headphones. To attempt to answer that question, the Guardian recruited Linn Records, purveyors of high-resolution music since 2007 and a recording label with access to the original files recorded by artists, bands and orchestras. (Pub quiz fact: the song used as the comparator for each attempt at the algorithm was Suzanne Vega’s Tom’s Diner.)īut the key question for hi-res audio is: can listeners can actually hear the difference? By contrast MP3s are compressed by an algorithm that throws away parts of the sound that long laborious testing determined could not actually be heard. 24-bit audio is often sampled at 96kHz or 192kHz those 24 bits can represent 16.7m discrete loudness values. The volume levels are then quantised into 16-bit quantities, which can represent 65,536 discrete values for the loudness. The failures of higher-quality music formats such as Super Audio CD (SACD) and DVD-Audio, and the continued absence of “24-bit audio” - which should give far higher resolution to sound than the 16-bit audio used on a CD - suggests that high-resolution music faces many challenges.īriefly: CD audio is digitally sampled at 44kHz, which sampling theory says can capture any frequency up to 22kHz - the upper limit of human hearing.
The premise is simple: high-resolution music sounds better than the highly compressed MP3 and even the CD, which preceded it as the most favoured form of digital audio for the best part of 30 years. Neil Young’s Pono player has spurred a renewed interest in high resolution audio – music that promises to bring the high-fidelity experience of vinyl to the digital age. Why are we still listening to over-compressed music through low-quality headphones when advances in bandwidth, storage capacity and speakers (not to mention headphones) means we could be listening to high-quality uncompressed audio all the time?
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