What is the “high resolution audio” you often hear on music devices? What are the benefits? [Explanation]
More and more music players, headphones, earphones, and recently televisions and sound bars (speakers with amplifiers) claim to support “high-resolution audio.”
What exactly is “high resolution” on these sound devices? What are the benefits of Hi-Res Audio when listening to music?
“High resolution” was originally a personal computer term
The word “resolution” may have come to the fore, but high resolution was originally a term used to indicate that a computer can display a screen with a screen resolution (pixels / dot count) higher than the system standard.
The old personal computer had 640 x 400 pixels for the NEC “PC-9800 series” (now the NEC personal computer), and 640 x 480 pixels for the “PC / AT compatible”, which is the source of most of the current personal computers. It was a standard resolution. A personal computer equipped with a graphics (drawing) function that can display resolutions higher than these resolutions was called a “high-resolution personal computer.”
Currently, high resolution displays such as Full HD (1920 x 1080 pixels) and 4K (3840 x 2160 pixels) have become “natural” instead of HD (1280 x 720 pixels / 1366 x 768 pixels), so the screen resolution. “High resolution” as a term for “” has become a dead word indeed.
High resolution
A catalog excerpt from the factory “FC-H98 Model 100” personal computer that was once sold by NEC. You can see the word “high resolution mode” (Source: NEC)
commercial
The “high resolution” in sound devices is “more than a CD”
“High resolution” in sound devices is simply used as a term for sound quality that exceeds that of music CDs or DATs (digital audio tapes).
In a digitized sound source, the “sample rate” (unit: kHz), which indicates how many times a second is sampled (sample metering) when digitizing analog audio, and the “quantum”, which indicates the amount of information contained in that of the signal. the number of digitized bits (unit: bits) greatly affects sound quality. Specifically, the sample rate affects the “expressible range (pitch range)”, and the number of quantization bits affects the “volume and fineness of the sound”.
