Digital audio enthusiasts, myself included, have been watching the fall and rise of sound quality closely over the last few years. Mass-market digital audio has been with us since the launch of storage media like the CD, but our migration towards files stored on portable devices or streamed from the cloud has been a rollercoaster in terms of quality.
The most significant developments have usually been at the behest of the largest tech companies, rather than record companies. Apple famously took the MP3 revolution mainstream with the birth of the iTunes Music Store in 2003, before launching a series of portable devices: the iPod, iPad, and the epoch-defining iPhone. But the MP3 revolution came at a cost, namely a degradation in audio quality compared to CDs.
A gradual clawback of audio quality mirrored the increase in data storage, and the iTunes Music Store doubled their default encoding rate in 2009. Similarly, streaming quality has increased in parallel with internet bandwidth. Once the digital audio genie was out of the internet bottle, factors as baroque as mobile bandwidth, on-device RAM, all-you-can-eat mobile data plans, and triple-play cable packages have arguably been as influential to the fortunes of the modern music business as the invention of the CD.
However, a recent technical development has triggered an entirely new wave of streaming digital audio quality. Bang & Olufsen’s most senior Tonmeister (sound engineer) Geoff Martin outlines what’s happened, and how. “For a time, streaming services, in general, made quality worse. But that time has passed. And that's because the way that streaming services work has changed. Initially, they were sending out low bitrate MP3 in the same way that Internet radio works these days. But what's happening now with services like TIDAL, Deezer HiFi and Qobuz is that they are pushing a FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) file out to the player.”
A codec (coder-decoder) is the mechanism by which the original master quality audio is encoded into a more portable format, and subsequently decoded for playback. While the "lossy" MP3 codec loses information which is deemed to be of less importance to the listener, FLAC files are lossless, so can deliver full CD quality audio. Geoff explains that this new development stretches the definition of streaming itself. “It looks like streaming, but it's not. It's a download for a one-time play; we can dance around the words if you want.”
While our ears may be attuned to lossy compressed audio in most everyday scenarios, the experience of rediscovering high-fidelity lossless digital audio can be nothing short of a revelation. Fine details reappear, performers have more space, sounds have more definition, audio feels warmer, sounds clearer, and is noticeably more pleasurable to listen to. The higher you go with audio file resolution, the better it gets.
Thanks to the new range of streaming apps delivering CD-quality or higher, our beloved “universal jukebox” is undergoing a significant upgrade. Consumer demand for high-resolution audio has been growing steadily, for example users of Deezer HiFi have increased by 71% in the past 12 months alone, and the product is now available in 180 countries and works with a wide range of FLAC streaming compatible devices.
Geoff believes that demand for hi-fi streaming audio is growing due to a rise in the number of people buying high-end audio devices. “It used to be that you bought an iPhone and you used the white earbuds, but nowadays people are upgrading to better headphones, so they want a better file and a better app to play it on. The potential is there for somebody that wants to get high quality, and they don't have to spend a lot of money to get it.”
To this end, Geoff recommends “a decent pair of noise-canceling headphones” for listening when out and about. He also uses the USB output on his mobile device to digitally connect to his headphones' USB port, but cautions against expecting hi-fi sound over a Bluetooth connection. “People really should pay attention to what the weakest link is. The question is how good is your player and how good are your speakers. If you're going to take a hi-fi service and then stream it over Bluetooth then there's no point in having the FLAC files. That's not the streaming services fault, that's the codec's fault. Bluetooth doesn't have the bandwidth to support CD quality. But if you're walking down the street you're not going to hear the difference.”
Founder and President of Pro Audio Design, Dave Malekpour, is an advocate of TIDAL’s high-end streaming options, in particular, the 96 kHz / 24 bit Masters option, which offers significantly higher playback quality than a CD. When Dave installs a mammoth set of Augspurger monitor speakers in professional recording studios he uses a specially curated TIDAL Masters playlist as the audio reference to fine tune the speaker calibration. “It simply sounds better" he explains, "once consumers hear the difference, some will pay more, but this level of quality is usually reserved for audiophiles.”
Mobile-centric audiophiles received a boost last week at trade show CES when it was announced that TIDAL Masters would now be available on all Android mobile devices. The award-winning technology underlying TIDAL’s product is “Master Quality Authenticated” or MQA, made by British company MQA Ltd who also partner with hi-fi manufacturers like ESS, NAD Electronics and Onkyo, and recently announced an in-car version with BlackBerry.
MQA Ltd CEO Mike Jbara explains where the growth in demand for high-resolution audio is coming from. “While it’s still too early to know if we’ve entered a new era, we do feel that the current momentum around hi-fi streaming is fuelled by a combination of artist/creator dissatisfaction with traditional digital audio sound, and a growing market of consumers who have come to expect innovation in their entertainment experiences. On that latter point, we feel that games, digital video, and social interactivity act as competitive forces to music and raise consumer expectations. We think this consumer sentiment is a leading indicator that gives cues to music services and CE companies that they will be rewarded for driving innovation.”
Regardless of your motivations, and whether you use a pair of noise-canceling headphones with a digital input, or a standalone FLAC streaming compatible hi-fi unit, I would suggest that your ears will thank you for the upgrade.
