Why High-Fidelity Streaming is the Audio Revolution Your Ears Have Been Waiting For (forbes.com)

From a report: While our ears may be attuned to lossy compressed audio in most everyday scenarios, the experience of rediscovering high-fidelity lossless digital audio can be nothing short of a revelation. Fine details reappear, performers have more space, sounds have more definition, audio feels warmer, sounds clearer, and is noticeably more pleasurable to listen to. The higher you go with audio file resolution, the better it gets. Thanks to the new range of streaming apps delivering CD-quality or higher, our beloved "universal jukebox" is undergoing a significant upgrade.

Consumer demand for high-resolution audio has been growing steadily, for example users of Deezer HiFi have increased by 71% in the past 12 months alone, and the product is now available in 180 countries and works with a wide range of FLAC streaming compatible devices. Bang & Olufsen's most senior Tonmeister (sound engineer) Geoff Marti believes that demand for hi-fi streaming audio is growing due to a rise in the number of people buying high-end audio devices. "It used to be that you bought an iPhone and you used the white earbuds, but nowadays people are upgrading to better headphones, so they want a better file and a better app to play it on. The potential is there for somebody that wants to get high quality, and they don't have to spend a lot of money to get it."

Comments

Quasi-religious nonsense

[gweihir]

Except for dynamics (which the compressed formats solve), CD audio is way beyond the quality most people can hear. For some reason, a lot of people fall for the scam and pa a lot of money for things that do not at all improve audio quality, like this one here, audio cables for hundreds of dollars, or even very expensive audio-Ethernet cables (which is so far beyond stupid it is staggering). I am sure this scam will also be able to separate victims and their cash.

Re:Quasi-religious nonsense

[gyp casino]

From the perspective of the new article, CDs would be considered lossless. What the article means by "lossy" is MP3 compression. Those new streaming services stream FLAC files (that I assume are ripped from CDs).

Re:Quasi-religious nonsense

[tlhIngan]

I'm all for 24-bit audio as long as the hardware is of sufficient quality that it can make any conceivable difference, and if it doesn't cost a lot more. Otherwise, CD quality is at least adequate, if not ideal. I'd rather have more tracks and more channels than more bits (and with the ability to assign the former to the latter dynamically.)

The dynamics of a 16 bit converter are sufficient for practically any real world situation, listening OR recording.

The average living room will have around 40dB of dynamic range - it's got a relatively high noise floor.

Even an sound chamber will rarely get you more than 80dB of dynamics.

A 16 bit converter has 96dB of dynamics - and your recording equipment, be it tape (90dB tops, -3dB per generation copy, so after a backup copy for safety, you'll be mastering from an 87dB, producing a 84dB "master" which you replicate at 81dB, for an all analog path). or other equipment (microiphone, etc) will generally have far less dynamic range.

Granted, to get full hearing range is around 120dB or so (a 20 bit converter) though the situations involving such large dynamic range in volume is rather limited practically.

And to DSD fans with their "1bit" converter, well, at 6dB, all DSD did was push the noise above 22.05kHz. (You can tell when you have a DSD recording that's improperly filtered as you get normal audio below 22.05kHz (1/2 44.1kHz, which is the equivalent sampling for DSD running at 2.something MHz) and a brick wall of crap above 22.05 on a spectral plit).

Not about quality

[Anonymous Coward]

FLAC isn't so much about quality as having a suitable format for archiving. If you have an audio cd which you intend to archive, then naturally you want a bit-for-bit identical copy of the cd. FLAC is the answer. From your master copy in FLAC you can then make any number of lossy copies in any format you want, whenever you want. I've been doing this for at least 15 years now, buying used cds from an online store like secondspin for an average of $4-5 per album, promptly archving them to FLAC format, and putting them away in storage.

Now, if you are talking about streaming FLAC, then I agree it's kind of ridiculous. 160 or 192 kb/s MP3 will be virtually indistinguishable from FLAC, and at least an order of magnitude less bandwidth.

Re:Most people can't tell the difference in A/B te

[lsllll]

I can't attest to use of amplifiers in scientific instrumentation, but performance is not everything, specially when it comes to audio applications. Yes, it's great that most class D amps reach 90% or higher efficiency, but that comes at a price.

Class D amps achieve their efficiency by turning the transistors completely off when not in use, as opposed to class AB which one of the transistor sets are on at all times or class A where the output transistors are on all the time. The switching off of the transistors is controlled via Pulse Width Modulation. This is the same concept used in most power supplies today, from PCs to phone chargers to LED bulb replacements for incandescent bulbs. This control can be via a digital circuit or an analog circuit. The digitally controlled circuit introduces too much error and distortion to be usable in audio applications. The analog controlled class D amps have historically been pretty hard to design correctly. They have complicated circuits and have mostly been non-linear in their reproduction of 20-20K Hz spectrum, something audiophiles strive really hard to achieve. I realize there have been new advents in overcoming these issues, but these usually come at a high price. A well-designed class D amp costs many times that of a well-designed class AB amp. Just look at the class D amps that are on the market and targeted to audiophiles. By comparison, I can pick up a used Aragon 4004 MKII for $500-$600 on ebay and be done with my amplifier needs, although my own amp is an ATI 1502 which can be had for even cheaper. These class AB amps provide completely linear audio amplification of their input signal at a fraction of the price of a comparable (in terms of quality) class D amp.

Re:Most people can't tell the difference in A/B te

[FrankSchwab]

Even digital signals are subject to SNR degradation - a crappy cable will increase the Bit Error Rate, eventually overwhelming the error correction capabilities of the protocol and introducing errors in the data.
Remember that, once you put a digital signal on a wire, it's now an analog signal (google "telecommunication eye pattern").