Tim Anderson's ITWriting

December 10, 2004

Is downloadable music the end for high end audio?

Let me put together a few thoughts. First, it's obvious that the future delivery mechanism for audio is the Internet. It's also obvious that the norm will be lossy compression, which flies in the face of efforts to maintain audio quality without any compromise. That strikes me as a sad reversal for hi-fi enthusiasts. Maybe there will be an option for lossless audio files, but that seems far from certain.

I realise CDs will be around for a while yet. However, the other day I saw an ad from someone putting up their entire CD collection for sale. "It's the digital era", he explained - CDs are digital too, but I assume he'd transferred them all to a hard disk somewhere and was thinking of that. If this catches on, we could see CD values nosedive in the same way as 2nd hand vinyl. Yes, the sleeves are nice, but that didn't save the LP and it won't save the CD either.

I don't mind how the music is delivered, as long as it doesn't carry a lock-in DRM such as Apple provides. I think the industry will sort out the DRM problem at some point, and adopt an open standard. But I do care about sound quality. Someone will say: "But you can't hear the difference in lossy compression, so why does it matter?" It's a good point; but I worry about adding an unecessary dependence on those compression algorithms. Can we be sure that all kinds of music will retain all the subtle nuances that distinguish great recordings?