![]() With its massive marketing clout, the Japanese audio giant threw its weight behind hi-res audio, created a black and gold logo to identify products that are compatible with the format, and began slapping it on everything from portable music players to A/V receivers. Shortly after Young showed off his prototype, Sony stepped into the hi-res ring. However, Neil Young wasn’t the only one who noticed that iPods and MP3s were failing to satisfy a demand for high-quality digital music. But despite the early enthusiasm for the idea, neither the player nor the store was ultimately able to grab much more than a small niche audience, and both were shuttered in 2017. The project also spawned an online music store where you could buy and download hi-res music. In 2014, the PonoPlayer launched on Kickstarter and was very successful - from a crowdfunding point of view - bringing in millions in funding. Young’s criticisms eventually led to action and in 2012 he showed off an early prototype of the PonoPlayer, a portable music device capable of playing hi-res audio. Folk-rock legend Neil Young was an early and outspoken critic of both the MP3 and its biggest purveyor at the time, Apple’s iTunes. The rebirth of hi-resĪs convenient and popular as iPods and MP3s were, not everyone was happy with what the new digital formats had done to music quality. ![]() It would be almost 15 years before portable storage was cheap enough and plentiful enough to house their (relatively) large file sizes. In fact, the opposite was true: In order to fit that much music, the iPod and other players at the time relied on the MP3 - a “lossy” digital audio format that actually deletes much of the information on an audio CD to keep file sizes as small as possible. With storage space at a premium, there was no way to include hi-res music files on these portable music players. Overnight, any growing momentum toward hi-res music was decimated by Apple’s promise of “a thousand songs in your pocket,” and music fans gobbled up iPods at a dizzying pace. By the time they were becoming more widely available - around 2001 - Apple turned the music-listening world upside down when it released the first iPod. Unfortunately for those first hi-res formats, they were born at exactly the wrong time. At the time, the audio industry tended to use terms like HD Audio and High-Resolution Audio interchangeably to describe these formats, which inevitably caused confusion among consumers. They used proprietary digital files that could only be played back by a limited (and fairly pricey) number of disc-playing devices, and neither developed much of a following outside of die-hard audiophile circles. They both launched within months of each other in the year 2000. The first widely available hi-res formats were Super Audio CD (SACD) and DVD-Audio. ![]() “Hi-res audio” is generally used to describe any digital audio file or format that exceeds the quality of an audio CD. Since its introduction, the audio CD has been a benchmark for digital audio quality. Here’s everything you need to get up to speed on hi-res audio, in plain English so that you can really wrap your head around higher-quality audio formats. With several music-streaming services like Deezer, Tidal, Amazon Music, and Apple Music all touting their hi-res audio options, more people than ever are taking an interest in it.īut what exactly is hi-res audio? What equipment do you need to listen to it? Where can you download or stream it? And does it actually sound better? These are the burning questions for those just hearing about hi-res audio, and we’re here to answer them for you. High-resolution audio, hi-res audio, or even HD audio - whatever you decide to call it (for the record, the industry prefers “hi-res audio”), it’s a catch-all term that describes a type of digital audio that goes well beyond your garden-variety MP3 file. ![]()
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