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Old 04-15-2014, 12:29 PM   #44
opendoor
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I've also read that Apple is considering selling high resolution music files through iTunes. Apparently most of what they get from labels is already 24 bit and 96k or 192k so they already have a catalog ready to go.

Seems kind of silly to me though. If they really want to sell better quality they should just sell lossless. I've seen several double blind studies where audio engineers and self proclaimed audiophiles were unable to tell the difference between CD quality files and higher resolution. Over thousands of samples by hundreds of participants the higher resolution file was identified something like 49.5% of the time, so basically they were completely guessing. I've tried ABX tests myself before and the only time I could tell a difference it was likely due to having different masters of the same recording so what I was hearing was the minute difference in the mastering and not the resolution.

Still, I'm sure there will be a market for it. Audiophiles love to throw money at placebos and when you have people spending thousands of dollars on speaker cables and power cords, high resolution music is a no brainer. And they'll argue until they're blue in the fact that they can absolutely hear a difference even if science disagrees.

The best thing to come out of high resolution audio (at least it was true for SACDs and whatnot) was that the masters were usually better than normal CDs. There was more focus on actually getting a great dynamic sound rather than hugely compressing the range to make it as loud as possible. If this leads to more of that, then great. But I suspect it'll just be higher resolution versions of the same master that already is out there.
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