Over the past few years, the movie industry has been heavily pushing High Definition TVs and content and so have camera manufacturers when it comes to cramming as many pixels as possible on the sensor. With the strong sales of HDTV sets and HD set-top boxes such as cable & satellite receivers, it is quite clear that many consumers do care about getting the best picture in their living room. The same goes when it comes to getting high quality photographs when on holidays. However, when it comes to music, it seems like the opposite is now happening with consumers moving away from purchasing CDs to music download services where the sound quality is inferior to the legacy CD format. Even still, the CD-audio is still quite far off from the quality of the original studio recordings.
With CD sales falling year after year and the strong growth of music download services, all most consumers care about is that they can download their music easily and play it back on their MP3 player without any hassle. As a result, most consumers are probably not aware that their downloaded music does not sound the same as a CD version, never mind the original studio recording. Most download services provide their music in a lossy format such as MP3, AAC or WMA at a bitrate of between 128kbps and 256kbps. The CD format on the other hand encodes the audio uncompressed at 1411kbps.
For the lossy formats to achieve such low bitrates, the encoder aims to throw out as much detail as possible that it considers "inaudible" to compress to the required bit rates, but regardless of the encoder, not even the world's best sound system or headphones can restore the fine details lost during the compression. For photography, it is like trying to restore an original RAW image from a JPEG, which is simply not possible.
As many consumers take downloaded music for granted, many don't realise what they are missing out, much like how the average consumer does not realise how much detail the DVD throws out until they see the same content from a HD source played on a large high definition TV. In fact, many musicians put a lot of work into achieving the best possible recordings, only for most of their hard work to be thrown away once some of the quality has been thrown away during the conversion to a low bitrate lossy format for online music services to sell.
At present, only a few online stores such as Magnatune and iTrax offer the ability to purchase high fidelity downloads, but unfortunately, both the stores and their music is not widely known. Peter Gabriel just recently launched a music download service, which uses Apple's Lossless format after expressing his frustration at most music online being sold as inferior downloads, when a lot of effort has been put into making the music sound right at the studio. He plans to continue releasing a new album each month through the service.
When music download services started taking off a few years ago, they decided to use low bitrates to minimise download time, especially for dial-up users and to maximise the number of songs that could fit on portable music devices’ tiny storage capacities, which started at around 64MB back then. However, despite most MP3 players now featuring gigabytes of capacity and the majority of users with high speed broadband connections, the music service providers only seem interested in trying to provide DRM-free downloads. They can just as easily offer lossless or high-fidelity versions, even if it means charging a small premium for the higher quality versions.
Further info can be read in this source Telegraph story.
