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What is high resolution audio?

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What is high resolution audio?

When it comes to music, Hi-Res Audio, also called Hi-Res Audio, is harder to find. The main way most of us listen to music is by streaming to portable devices like smartphones. While very convenient, this trend has set us back in terms of what we consider a good music listening experience.

High-Res Audio

By this we mean that the file formats used by streaming services are of lower quality. Compared to CD format, MP3 files and music streaming from iTunes, Yandex.Music, Spotify and other services simply contain less data to create music. To put music in a format that can be easily streamed and give listeners the ability to store many songs on a portable music player or smartphone, 80% of the information present in the original recording can be removed.

What is Hi-Res Audio?

Due to the proliferation of the experience of listening to low-quality music, a strategy has been put in place to bring back high-quality two-channel audio by expanding the capabilities of downloadable and playable music to match or exceed CD quality. This initiative is called Hi-Res Audio, Hi-Res Music or HRA. For the purposes of this article, we are referring to the most common term: High Resolution Audio.

CD quality benchmark

The CD format is considered the benchmark that separates low-resolution audio from high-resolution audio. Technically speaking, Audio CD is an uncompressed digital format that is represented by 16-bit PCM with a sample rate of 44.1 kHz.

Anything below the CD breakpoint, such as MP3, AAC, WMA, and other highly compressed formats, is considered low-resolution audio, and anything above is considered high-resolution audio.

Hi-Res Audio Formats

High-resolution audio is provided on physical media in HDCD, SACD, and DVD-Audio formats. However, with many no longer using physical media, a strategic step has been taken to provide listeners with the ability to access high-definition audio through downloads and streaming.

Non-physical high-resolution digital audio formats include ALAC, AIFF, FLAC, WAV, DSD (the same format used in SACDs), and PCM (with a higher sample rate and bits than CDs).

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Hi-Res Audio Files

Hi-Res Audio Files

Hi-Res Audio

Audio files 192 kHz / 24 bit, 176/24, 96/24, 9624, 24 bit / 96 kHz, 24/96, FLAC96, 192WAV, etc.

Lossless or uncompressed compressed digital files to accurately store and reproduce pulse code modulation (PCM) digitized sound. Audio files are generally considered High Definition (BP) files if they have a sample rate of 88.2 or 176.4 kHz (multiples of 44.1 kHz), 96 or 192 kHz (multiples of 48 kHz) or higher and 24 bits or higher.

For accurate sound reproduction, files must be in lossless formats. The most commonly used formats (codecs) are WAV, FLAC, WMA, AIFF and ALAC. WAV (Waveform Audio Format) is a format commonly used as a wrapper for uncompressed audio digitized using PCM. FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec – open lossless audio codec) is a popular audio compression format that does not remove any information from the audio stream and is suitable for both listening to music on high-quality audio equipment and for storing a collection audio on a hard drive. WMA (Windows Media Audio) is a compressed format developed by Microsoft (UNITED STATES). For accurate sound reproduction, the Lossless version is preferred. AIFF (Audio Interchange File Format) was developed by Apple Computer (USA) in two versions: with and without compression, and is most often used on Apple computers. ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec) is an open source lossless audio codec also developed by Apple. There are also other formats for storing and playing audio files.

Audio files can be exact (“bitwise”) copies of studio master files, their variants with different sample rates and bit depths, or digital files obtained by digitizing analog audio recordings.

To put audio files on the hard drive of a computer or music server, you can download them from the Internet, transfer them from another PC, flash drive, or optical disc. An example of the latter is HRx discs

DXD (Digital eXtreme Definition) is a BP format that was initially used only for professional sound recording. The DXD format uses PCM to digitally encode audio data with a sample rate of 352.8 kHz and 24 or 32 bits. The DXD format was developed in 2004 by Digital Audio Denmark (Denmark) and was originally used to record and process sound in the production of super-audio discs.

However, it later began to be used as a standalone digital audio recording format. Since 2012, DXD music files are distributed on the Internet. The release of consumer DACs that support this format is expanding.

In addition to the aforementioned formats, in which the signal was digitized using PCM, since 2010 DSD audio files have been distributed on the Internet, in which another technology was used for encoding: Direct Stream Digital (direct digital stream), based on sigma-delta modulation. This is the same technology that is used in SACDs (see below). DSD audio files have the extension DFF or DSF.

Encoding with different sampling rates is used: 2.8224 MHz, such as SACD (often referred to as DSD64, as this frequency is 64 times higher than CD, or single DSD, DSD1), with a frequency twice as high high: 5.6448 MHz (designated DSD128, 2xDSD, DSD2, 5.6MHz DSD or Double-DSD), four times higher: 11.2896 MHz (DSD256, 4xDSD, DSD4, 11.2MHz DSD or Quad-DSD) and even eight times higher higher than 22.5792 MHz (DSD512, 8xDSD, DSD8, 22.5MHz DSD or Octuple-DSD). There are also DSD files in multiples of 48 kHz – 3.072 / 6.144 / 12.288 / 24.576 MHz.

With the appropriate software and DAC, DSD audio files can be played from a computer in their native format, or they can be converted to PCM files for playback using non-DSD digital-to-analog converters.

MQA is a compression technology proposed in December 2014 by the British company Meridian Audio, which previously developed the MLP method for DVD audio discs (see below). MQA (Master Quality Authenticated, Russia Confirmed Studio Quality) technology is based on the use of a special codec that allows you to significantly reduce (by an order of magnitude) the size of a digital audio file to simplify its transmission and storage , and then decode without degrading sound quality, according to the company. …

Everything you need to know about high resolution

Everything you need to know about high resolution

Hi-Res Audio

High Definition Audio is the choice of the most dedicated digital music fans. What is it, where to get it, and what does it take to hear it?

Hi-Res Audio

If you’re a bit interested in digital music (whether it’s listening to CDs or streaming from Spotify on your smartphone), you’ve probably come across the term “high-definition audio” or “high-resolution audio.”

In recent years, the popularity of Hi-Res Audio is slowly but surely gaining momentum, fueled by the emergence of new components, streaming services, and even smartphones that support this standard. Until recently, it was a niche segment for a narrow circle of insiders, but today everyone wants to join it.

If you want to get the best possible music listening experience, or at least better sound quality, you should familiarize yourself with the concept of Hi-Res Audio.

This perspective is a bit overwhelming as it involves many factors. What is Hi-Res Audio? What do all these formats and numbers mean? Where can I get high-quality files and on what devices can I play them? Finally, where do you start?

Our guide to the world of Hi-Res Audio will help you understand the matter in depth. After reading this material to the end, you will be armed with all the necessary knowledge and take the first step into the magical world of the best sound.

WHAT IS HI-RES-AUDIO?

Unlike HD video, there is still no universal standard for high definition audio. Digital Entertainment Group, Consumer Electronics Association and The Recording Academy, as well as the largest recording companies define it as follows: “An audio file in a lossless format that carries a soundtrack across the entire frequency range in which it was mastered using higher quality equipment than CD ”.

In simple terms, this term generally refers to recordings with a higher sample rate and / or bit depth than a CD (i.e. 16-bit / 44.1 kHz).

The sample rate indicates how many times per second the signal is sampled during its conversion from analog to digital. The higher the bit depth, the more accurately the signal is measured at the sample point, so the transition from 16-bit to 24-bit can significantly improve quality.

High-resolution audio formats typically have a sample rate of 96 or 192 kHz at 24 bits. Also, there are files with 44.1, 88.2 and 176.4 kHz.

Small loss

However, Hi-Res Audio has one major drawback: the size of the files. They are typically tens of megabytes in size, and a few songs can easily take up all of your device’s memory. Because of this, they are difficult to transfer over mobile networks and Wi-Fi.

And that’s not all: each of the Hi-Res Audio file formats has certain compatibility limitations. Examples include FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) and ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec); both theoretically provide lossless transmission of musical information. In addition, there are uncompressed formats: WAV and AIFF, DSD (the format used in Super Audio CD) and the recently developed MQA (Master Quality Authenticated).

The relative advantages of each format can be discussed, but the first thing to consider is their compatibility with audio components and software solutions.

WHAT IS GOOD FOR HIGH RESOLUTION AUDIO FORMATS?

The main advantage of high definition formats over tablets is the higher sound quality. Downloadable sites like Amazon and iTunes and streaming services like Spotify offer relatively low bitrate compression formats, such as 256kbps AAC from Apple Music and Spotify’s 320kbps Ogg Vorbis.

During the compression encoding process, some information is lost; in other words, the signal resolution is reduced for convenience and file size reduction. This affects the sound quality: in these formats, your favorite songs will not be fully revealed.

Master class

While you can put up with this when listening to Spotify playlists on the bus ride to work, true music fans won’t have enough. High definition audio comes to your aid.

To understand why it should sound better than MP3, let’s compare its bit rates. The highest possible bit rate for an MP3 is 320 kbps, while a 24-bit / 192 kHz file is 9216 kbps for streaming and 1411 kbps for a CD.

Therefore, 24/96 or 24/192 high-resolution audio files should more accurately recreate the sound that musicians and engineers worked on.

What is Hi-Res sound and how it differs from normal audio

In recent times, many manufacturers of audio products have begun to add Hi-Res products to their catalogs, an acronym that comes from the English «High-Resolution», and indicates that the device is ready to play the audio with it quality that has been recorded, which is synonymous with maximum fidelity. But what features does Hi-Res sound have and why is it different from normal audio?

What is the Hi-Res sound?

The sound that is recorded in the studios – whether music, cinema, dubbing or whatever – is raw audio, without compression, and the recording is done in an analog way, because as you know the sound is formed by waves . Logically, for this audio to be heard on our televisions, smartphones, consoles and others, it is necessary to convert it to digital, and for that to be possible we must first be able to measure the waves so that they can then be recreated in the device that is going To emit the sound.

To measure these waves, a series of periodic samples are taken, and this is what is called the sampling rate. This sampling rate cannot be infinitely, logically, but the higher, the greater the fidelity of the audio we are converting to digital, and that is why we set some scales or minimums for each quality.

Thus, for example, the audio sampling frequency of a normal music CD is 44.1 Khz, which means 44,100 samples are taken from the waves per second. For Hi-Res sound, the standard is set at 96 Khz, or 96,000 wave samples per second, so you will be collecting many more nuances of the original sound, being much more faithful to it.

Hi-Res sampling rate comparison

As for the sound we reproduce in our equipment, there is another factor to consider: compression.

The normal sound, when recorded, is done in a pure format and without compressing anything. But this type of sound has the disadvantage that the size of the files is very large, so it becomes complicated to store them in multimedia playback devices. This is especially true if we think that most users use our mobile or tablet to play audio files.

To reduce the size of these files, sound file compressors were created, such as the MP3 format, which try to give a more or less authentic approximation to the original sound source, but with a considerably smaller file size. For example, if an MP3 file with a compression of 256 kbps has a size of about 3 megabytes, that same file, without compressing, can have more than 30 MB.

What does Hi-Res sound bring to normal audio?

When the sound is compressed, or as we have seen when it is converted from analog to digital, many audio frequencies are lost, among which are many subtle details of the sound, which give it much more body. As we explained before, Hi-Res sound tries to get closer to the original audio, setting its quality standard with a sampling frequency and bit depth much higher than normal audio.

Currently, the Hi-Res sound formats that exist are: WAV, FLAC, ALAC, DSD and MQA. Of all of them, probably the best known for PC are the WAV format and the FLAC. The WAV format is usually used to record the original audios, but their files take up a lot of space because it is still uncompressed audio. The FLAC format is a type of compression that also falls within the Hi-Res sound quality and sufficiently compresses the sound source so that the loss of quality is absolutely minimized.

What do we need to hear Hi-Res sound?

Since the audio we will have in hand has certain special characteristics in terms of frequencies and formats, we will need an audio player that is capable of dealing with these compression formats, since not all players are capable of doing so. However, virtually any modern PC sound card, including those integrated into the boards, as well as many smartphones on the market (not televisions), are already capable of handling Hi-Res sound. According to the Japanese Audio Society, who created the Hi-Res audio standard, the DAC (the analog-to-digital converter) must be able to process audio at 96 KHz and 24 bit.

What is the HI RES AUDIO

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.