Audio formats: rating and benefits
As actual field studies have shown, a good idea to rank the top ten audio formats turned out to be an impossible task at first.
Competition conditions too different for unequal participants. In addition, some corruption schemes or lobbyists of transnational companies in the field of audio recording interfere in our good cause to help people choose the best sound product.
The world’s most popular MP3 format reached the leaders of popular love solely due to multi-million dollar promotional investments. And if you take the sound quality, then regular. And even in terms of compression and disk space savings, it’s not the highest compression either.
Therefore, a compromise decision was made: divide the test subjects into three groups and compare and identify the leaders by groups.
Three types of audio formats
No compression.
Lossless compression.
Lossy compression.
Uncompressed audio recording formats show their best performance only on high-quality professional audio equipment.
If you have an inexpensive tablet or smartphone in your hands, then wonderful music will sound on your device, but you will not hear it simply because the hardware and software resource and the speakers or headphones cannot reproduce such high sound quality.
On the other hand, if you start MP3 sound recording through professional stereos and amplifiers, you will hear such noise and rattle from the speakers that, again, this type of use is completely meaningless.
Audio classification by type of sound reproduction equipment
For professional equipment, uncompressed audio formats.
For semi-professional teams, compressed audio formats. But without loss.
For inexpensive equipment: lossy and compressed audio formats.
In the first case, the hardware is so expensive that it is ridiculous to worry about saving money on media.
In the second case, the owner of an Apple device for a thousand dollars will obviously be able to call himself and spend a couple of hundred dollars on a bulky memory.
In the third case, since it has hardly been possible to raise money for a cheap smartphone, saving on the size of the stored music is very important. Well, no one is going to listen to a symphony orchestra in Hi-Fi on the phone anyway. Unless you can download a ringtone from the classics for fun to make it look like a fresh bell pepper to the eyes of tomatoes.
With this concludes the overture, we begin to present the subject.
Audio formats for high quality sound
This includes uncompressed formats.
PCM – Pulse Code Modulation. The original analog audio is sampled as is, without any modification.
PCM is the most common audio recording format used on CDs and DVDs. Dolby multi-channel, surround, subject to high-quality speakers, sounding almost one-on-one with a live performance.
If you like to sit in front of a home theater and immerse yourself in empathy for the main and supporting characters in the movie, this is it.
Wav
A fairly old format, developed as early as 1991. Well, the old masters always thought of high quality.
Many people consider WAV to be an uncompressed format. But it is actually a container and it can also contain compressed files.
In most cases, WAV contains uncompressed PCM audio. Therefore, the quality is high. But even for one minute of recording, approximately 32MB of memory is wasted.
Good enough compatibility with Windows and Mac.
AIFF
WAV analog from Apple developers. This is also a container and also usually contains sound in PCM format. Good compatibility with Windows.
Lossy compressed audio formats
Truly popular formats for everyone.
MP3
In accordance with the MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3 standard, it appeared in 1993 and instantly won universal love precisely because of its economy in memory consumption.
A CD can store the complete discography of your favorite band.
Throw some records in the glove compartment and you can enjoy music from Kaliningrad to Vladivostok.
During this time, you can listen to all the books by all the writers worth listening to.
The MP3 format is such a solid eunuch, from which they cut the most reluctant, but began to show the ability to store and save. So MP3 is a very inexpensive format.
The main advantage is that he leans on everything that he just plays and sings.
AAC
An advanced form of audio encoding. The younger but advanced brother of MP3. It has slightly improved sound characteristics and a higher compression ratio.
Applies to Android, iOS, iTunes, YouTube, Nintendo, and the latest versions of PlayStation.
