The scope and richness of the original recording are diminished in order to shrink the audio file to make it easier for streaming and downloading. This file reduction is known as lossy compression. When you listen to audio through services like Spotify, which uses a mid-quality file format known as Ogg Vorbis, the audio file you hear has been compressed to make it easier to stream.

Similarly, high-resolution audio can also make a huge difference in how you experience a podcast, enhancing voice clarity and adding extra polish to music and effects. That’s why, with high-resolution music, you hear every artist intended breath, squelch, and bump with a depth and crispness you can’t get from lesser audio formats. The higher the bit depth and sample frequency of the track, the better it is at relaying to the listener all of the information from the original recording. For perspective, most high-resolution audio content is in the range of 24-bit/96kHz and can even go as high as 192kHz. So in the CD-standard measure, there are 16 bits per sample and 44,100 samples per second. In that figure, bit depth refers to the amount of data in each sample sample frequency, or sample rate, refers to the number of times per second a sound is sampled. The standard measure of CD quality is 16-bit/44.1kHz. Their definition: “lossless audio capable of reproducing the full spectrum of sound from recordings which have been mastered from better than CD quality (48 kHz/20-bit or higher) music sources which represent what the artists, producers, and engineers originally intended.' What are the benefits of high-resolution audio?Ĭompared to compressed audio files like the commonly used AAC and MP3 formats, hi-res audio formats provide a much higher quality listening experience. While the concept of high-resolution audio has been around for quite some time, it wasn’t until 2014 that the Recording Industry Association of America joined with the Consumer Electronics Association, Digital Entertainment Group, and the Recording Academy Producers & Engineers Wing to officially define high-resolution audio. High-resolution audio, sometimes referred to as HD or hi-res audio, delivers sound quality that’s as close to the original source recording as possible.

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