BackTuning in to high-end HD music
High-definition or lossless music is going mainstream, but do you really need to buy a new, expensive device to hear it?
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Broach the topic of music downloads and most users would list the MP3 format as their preference. It is essentially a way of compressing audio tracks into smaller sizes. The bigger benefit, of course, is that this takes up less space and is playable on smartphones and tablets, and on a variety of music players. But the sudden popularity of high-definition (HD) music (also known as high-resolution music or lossless music) is making people sit up and take notice of the PonoPlayer (and its online music store) and the forthcoming Sony Walkman—two of the most talked about devices among music enthusiasts.
HD audio is generally defined as an audio recording that has been captured during a studio session, with hardware capable of matching or exceeding the perceived limitations of human hearing. It is generally accepted that the human ear can hear frequencies between 20 Hz and 20 kHz, with the maximum audibility limit being 135 dB. In digital music recordings, HD audio means at least 48 kHz/24 bit, going up to 96 kHz/24 bit or 192 kHz/24 bit (see “Understanding the numbers").
These tracks are then saved through lossless compression, so that there is no loss of quality or detailing, and each track size is much larger than a traditional MP3 or CD-quality track. These HD tracks are usually in formats such as WAV, AIFF, ALAC and FLAC.
But can the human ear really make out the difference between high-quality MP3s and HD music tracks? In a 2007 paper, titled Audibility Of A CD-Standard A/DA/A Loop Inserted Into High-Resolution Audio Playback, published in the Journal Of The Audio Engineering Society, E. Brad Meyer and David R. Moran did a blind test on a series of listeners over a period of time.
They would play back HD audio files from very high-end hardware, but occasionally reduce that quality to 44.1 kHz/16 bit (audio CD quality). The idea was to see if people could tell the difference. And they couldn’t.
Unless you have been listening to professional- grade audio on equally powerful and precisely tuned equipment (receivers, speakers, etc.), chances are you will not be able to spot the difference.
Music lovers will disagree, and those who have money will spend. But does every music lover really need to invest $399 (around ₹ 24,000) in Pono’s Toblerone-inspired HD audio player? “Form should always reflect and enhance function. Utility comes first," was the very first lesson (out of six) from the Bauhaus school of art and architecture in Weimar, Germany, in 1919. Modern-day product designers still follow the teachings of Bauhaus. But the PonoPlayer clearly doesn’t subscribe to that viewpoint. The Toblerone bar-style design makes it ungainly to handle, and doesn’t naturally fit well in the hand.
So would it make sense to invest instead in the Sony Walkman NW-ZX2 (128 GB internal storage), which runs on the Android 4.2 operating system and will cost £949 ( ₹ 88,500) when it officially hits stores in the next couple of months? Not really.
So can your existing smartphone be used for HD audio? Yes, if you already own a recently launched smartphone. The likes of BlackBerry 10, LG G3, Samsung Galaxy Note 4 and Sony Xperia Z3 can play HD audio files. More and more phones are now adding support for HD audio formats.
If you do decide to go in for the Pono or the Sony Walkman, you will have to invest in the accompanying hardware (earphones, headphones or speakers) if you really want to hear the difference in sound.
What’s more, you don’t really need Pono’s music store—there are many alternatives available, such as www.hdtracks.com and www.highres audio.com, which offer an incredible number of albums across genres in HD audio formats and can be played on a variety of devices.
Bit rates, frequencies and track sizes made easier
The unit kHz (short for kiloHertz) is a measure of frequency (cycles per second). For digital audio, it describes the amount of data used per second to transfer analogue sound to digital form. This is also known as sampling rate or sampling frequency. The standard rates for recordings are—8 kHz for speech and audiobooks, 22 kHz for vinyl records and cassette tapes, 32 kHz for radio stations and music streamed through websites and apps, 44.1 kHz for audio CDs, MP3, AAC and WMA downloads, and 48/96 kHz for high-definition recordings and professional audio.
A bit is the basic unit of information in the world of computers, with either of the two values—0 or 1. Telephone audio works on 8 bit, so does AM Radio. Audio CDs and vinyl records use 16 bit, while 24- bit audio is used for studio recordings.
High-resolution audio files take up an enormous amount of space. Standard MP3 tracks usually range from 3-12 MB per song. But FLAC tracks (HD audio tracks), for example, can be anywhere from 30-200 MB, depending on frequency and bits. CD-quality tracks are about 10 times larger than the 128 kbps MP3 tracks, and DSD64 format files are 40 times larger. For most users, that kind of storage space is just not available.
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