Sony high-resolution audio: Is 2015 the year it takes off?
In the last 15 years, as digital music has slowly but surely extinguished the analog flame, the focus with digital audio has always been on enabling easy access, portability, and manageability of the content.
The MP3 format, and other compression codecs like AAC, Windows Media Audio, etc., have revolutionized the way music is distributed and consumed.
These technologies took music from a physical format on CDs to one that could be stored or accessed on a digital player, tablet, phone, computer, or streaming device, making an enormous amount of audio available to consumers.
The original Rio player, iPod, iPhone, PC, streaming devices, and the countless other devices that play and stream digital music have helped to transform the music and consumer electronics industries.
Along the way, however, sound quality has generally taken a back seat to advances in usability, the amount of content available, customizability of the music experience, and convenience of having your music whenever and wherever you want it.
With the battle for supremacy now won, and digital music firmly entrenched in our lives, it’s now time to take the next step: It’s time to move from crappy MP3s and low-quality streams to high-resolution audio.
What exactly is high-resolution audio? For the purposes of this discussion, the focus will be in hi-res audio for music content, not movies and video, because there is quite a bit of difference in how music and video is consumed.
High-resolution audio has been available since the advent of the DVD and on Blu-ray discs with Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD soundtracks, but that’s a whole different discussion. This one’s about music, which in the digital world is mostly in non-high-res formats like MP3 and AAC.
Source: Extreme Tech