How to find and play high-resolution audio on the Mac

By Kirk McElhearn , Macworld.com  

Everybody is familiar with high-definition video these days, which packs more visual information (more pixels) into the shows you see on TV and on Blu-ray discs. But you may not know much about high-resolution audio, which offers music in formats with clarity and fidelity that can be superior to that of CDs. I took a look at the current offerings, and how you can play these high-resolution files on a Mac. Here’s what you need to know.

For starters, let’s look at what makes a file “high-resolution.” When you buy music online, it’s usually compressed. iTunes sells music as 256-kbps AAC files, and Amazon offers MP3 files at around the same bit rate. If you compare these bit rates with the music on audio CDs, which is 1411 kbps, you can see there’s a big difference. Nevertheless, many people can’t hear the difference between CDs and most compressed files , though this can depend on a lot of factors.

But you can get music files with resolution even higher than that of a CD, although there’s more to it than just bit rate.

CDs have audio at 16 bits and 44.1kHz. The former is the “bit depth,” or the number of bits of data recorded for each sample; the higher the better. The latter is the sample rate, or the number of samples per second; this is the number of “frames,” as it were, of sound made in a second. That 44.1kHz means that there are 44,100 samples per second. The majority of high-resolution files are 24-bit and 96kHz, which translates, roughly, into three times as much data per second as the audio you’ll find on a standard CD. (There are other high-resolution files, which may be 24-bit and 88.1kHz or even 192kHz, but I’ll stick with 96 kHz, as that’s the highest sample rate that Macs can play. Also, some sites sell 5.1-channel surround mixes, but you’ll need special equipment to be able to play them back.)

How does this translate into file size? As an example, a 9-minute and 25-second live recording from the band Phish weighs in at 18.4MB for a 256-kbps MP3 file, 67MB for a CD-quality FLAC file, and 126.2MB for a 24/96 FLAC file.

The market for high-resolution audio files is clearly one for audiophiles but, while a niche within a niche, it is growing, and more and more labels and websites are selling files in these formats. Initially, classical music was the first genre to offer such files, as many classical labels were already recording in high-resolution for SACDs (super-audio CDs) and and DVD-Audio discs, and needed to simply convert their existing files to the appropriate formats. But the growth in this sector has led to many pop, rock, and jazz albums being released in these formats. For new recordings, this is easy, because they are now commonly recorded in 24/96 format. The files sold are often called “studio masters,” because they are the format that is used in the studio for the actual recording process.

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