Everything you wanted to know about Hi-res and didn’t dare to ask.
With the Walkman’s return to our lives, we saw that a trend that had sounded since 2012 made another call to consumers: Hi-Res Audio. High-definition sound will be one of the striking themes that, like UHD on television, could change the demands that consumers want in their products.
However, many only know this type of audio by some yellow sticker attached to a device. But what is Hi-res Audio? Is it as good as they say? Here we tell you.
To clean your ears well
Since the arrival of digital formats, audio recordings have maintained a quality standard whose measurement point is an audio CD. The quality of this format is 16-bit / 44.1 kHz.
To understand these two measurements you have to understand how music is digitized from similar sources. The scanning programs convert the sound waves into bits, and for that they must take a limited number of audio samples and convert them into information. The second number (44.1 kHz) indicates the number of samples per second that are taken to make the conversion, and is called the sampling rate. The first number (16-bit) indicates how much information is captured from each sample. Simplifying a bit, the more bits an audio file has, the more information it receives, the more faithful it is to the original analogue and the better quality it has.
However, files of this quality are very heavy for a computer and other devices that served as audio players from past decades, so .MP3 was born as a format that compresses information and offers sufficient audio quality for most of consumers.
But with the advent of new technologies, and the revival of some old ones, consumers began to worry again about audio. Now we buy the soundbar because we want to hear our Spotify stream perfectly, or we look for the best home theater to feel like in a movie theater. And that we have created those needs are driving new formats (which have been around for a long time, but were recently popularized) But, to validate these new formats, a standard was needed, and thus the definition of Hi-res Audio was born:
“Audio without loss of quality that is capable of reproducing the total sound range of recordings that have been finalized from better quality music sources than a CD.”
As WhatHiFi reports, this definition was given by the Digital Entertainment Group (DEG) together with the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) and the Recording Academy. This group was joined by companies such as Sony Music Entertainment and Universal Music Group. And by the way, they defined the formats of high resolution audio sources:
MQ-A: That comes from an analog source.
MQ-P: That comes from a PCM master source (48kHz / 20-bit or greater, such as 96/24 or 192/24)
MQ-D: That comes from a DSD / DSF master source, which are formats used in studio audio editing.
MQ-C: That comes from a CD.
And under a more popular definition, high-resolution audio is the one that can make you feel your hair bristling when the ‘Stairway to Heaven’ solo sounds, or the solo La rebellion ’piano solo by Joe Arroyo. A feeling that is not achieved when the format is not able to reproduce the entire sound spectrum that moves our guts.
So if you want to have songs of good quality, the first thing that should be fixed is that the store that sells them offers Hi-Res formats (the Sony music store, HD Tracks, PonoMusic, Gimell, etc …), and usually what they will download will be a file type .FLAC, .DSD, .AIFF, .WAV or .ALAC. In terms of image, they would be like the RAW of the audio. These types of files take up much (much) more space than a .MP3, so be prepared in case the flies.
Great sound requires great machinery
In order not to lose money or effort, it is necessary to have a good team that is capable of reproducing high quality audio. At home we must have a sound system with high quality speakers. Some cell phones such as the LG G3, the Sony Xperia Z3 and the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 have the power to play Hi-Res audio without buying headphone amplifiers. Other cell phones such as the iPhone 6 need an amplifier to give the headphones enough power to reproduce the high resolution audio. And, precisely, to be able to hear these files it is necessary that the player and the speakers that emit the sound are of high quality and can reproduce the entire spectrum.
