While this is more practical for everyday usage and storage, the end result doesn’t quite sound as good as its original recording. To meet cost and storage restraints artists and producers alike have typically been forced to down-sample the quality of their music, lowering the quality that us listeners ultimately end up hearing.

The battle between being faithful to representing the sounds themselves while using viable technology at a reasonable price. Essentially, technical limitations and cost have been holding us back from audio nirvana the entire time. So why has it not been readily available until now?Įver since music has become readily available, fans have been itching to listen to tracks in as high a quality as possible.

As WAV is also an older format, it does not support the tagging system that FLAC and ALAC does meaning you’ll have to put more effort into keeping your music collection organised. The obvious downside is that the extra space required does start to add up once you build yourself a nice collection. You’ll find no compression here! Although they’re generally larger than FLAC or ALAC files so you can be sure that you’re getting the file EXACTLY as it was intended.

The third format we think you’ve probably seen before: the WAV file, Windows uncompressed digital format. This is useful for people using iTunes as their playback software. More recently, a number of sites have begun to offer downloads in the ALAC Apple Lossless format. The open source nature of the format and the useful saving in space over a true uncompressed format starts to make a very big difference when you are dealing with albums that can be over a gigabyte in size. The most common format for downloads is FLAC. The downloads themselves are available in a variety of formats. They might be compact but they still carry many times the information that a 16/44.1kHz sized CD file can. Studios commonly work with these sampling rates so that the files are smaller and much more practical to download and stream via a wireless network. Even studio masters of many albums are not produced at this level as the processing required and the size of the files just aren’t going to be an option for most people! Albums mastered at 24/44.1, 24/88.2 and 24/96 are rather more common. The ‘up to’ in that sentence is important because 192kHz material is still generally very rare. High-Resolution Audio, or High-Res Audio, as you can probably guess, is audio signal that’s delivered at a higher quality than the CDs, MP3s and streaming services.ĬDs, for example, are only standardised at 44.1kHz/16bit while the most commonly used High-Res Audio specifications are 24bit/96kHz and 24bit/192kHz, providing a noticeable improvement in sound quality.ĭownloaded music sold as high res is mastered as 24 bits in sampling rates up to 192kHz.

High res audio