Hi res audio? Just gimme some truth.

The audio world has long been a place where small incremental upgrades have been seen (or heard lol) to make a difference to the quality of what one is hearing. Cables, amps, power filters – the list of ways to improve your playback experience is endless.

Apple’s recent announcement that Apple Music will start streaming this month in high resolution audio is a good thing, but yet again is something they’ve managed to brand as unique when it’s far from the truth. They are starting to stream at CD quality – 16 bit, 44Khz – which had been the gold standard from the consumer release of CD systems in 1982 and their upper quality threshold of 24 bit, 192 Khz which has been available since the mid 1990s . To borrow the line from John Lennon’s song Gimme Some Truth this is just “money for rope”

The real advances in audio playback have been already been made by revisiting master tapes and capturing them using either DSD (Direct Stream Digital) or 24 bit 192Khz sampling. One of the greatest selling artists of all time Neil Young even created his own hi res audio player and ecosystem called Pono. Sadly the venture failed – the hardware sounded great, but had an extremely clunky UI, and came at a time of convergence – where people wanted to use a single device to text, make calls, take photos, navigate and listen to music. That’s why for Pono mainstream success was elusive.

Some might argue that compressed MP3 audio is fine and you cannot hear the difference against a hi resolution audio master. I completely disagree with this. With a half decent DAC, mid-range amplifier and speakers you can hear the difference in space between instruments, in mid-range bite, and high end cymbal decay. You just need someone with a trained ear to point out the part(s) of a recording where you can discern the difference. Once you hear it you can never go back to hearing something in compressed audio again.

Just like when Chris Morris on Brasseye debated with Sir Peregrene Worsthorne whether wasps sting or not – “Well, come out into our garden in South Bucks, on a summer’s day and I’ll find you a wasp”– I suggest you go to your local hi-fi store and hear the difference for yourself.

One of things that music distribution companies do very well is repackage the same content over and over again for you to keep buying it. This is where the landscape becomes a little more difficult to traverse. If you have something that you are satisfied with then of course do not rebuy it again, especially if you don’t have the playback setup to highlight the improvement. Also, look out for the mastering engineer – there are genius engineers out there right now – such as Kevin Gray, Steve Hoffman, Rob LaVerde, Giles Martin and Barry Diament to name a few – whatever they touch sounds better than what it did before.

At the end of the day, just remember it’s all about the music!