For years, it seemed all hope was lost for audiophiles, as the new audio technologies gave up the goal of high resolution audio and instead chased a futuristic ideal of convenience and simplicity. Bluetooth and WiFi speakers proliferated, and some consumers began to ask why they would even bother spending the money for high fidelity. So why should you care about high resolution audio?
what is high resolution audio?
“Lossless audio that is capable of reproducing the full range of sound from recordings that have been mastered from better than CD quality music sources". -The Digital Entertainment Group, Consumer Electronics Association and The Recording Academy
In the simplest terms, this means that the audio file you are transmitting contains more musical information. Lower quality audio leaves out important info that the artist intended for you to hear, but you lose if you playback through low resolution.
In a recent Spotify promotional video, Grammy-award winner Billie Eilish emphasized how important it is to her for her fans to hear her music through high resolution audio.
She explains how "there's just things you will not hear if you don't have a good sound system." She adds, "we make music that wants to be heard the way it was made." I experienced this first hand when listening to her debut album When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? The production throughout the entire album is an extremely intricate mix of dynamic range and subtle details that could easily be missed without a worthy sound system.
The first time I heard her Number 1 hit "Bad Guy" on a pair of Audality wireless speakers, I realized just how much of the music gets lost through audio compression with Bluetooth and Wi-Fi speakers. I had heard that song over a thousand times by that point, but this was the first time I really heard it for what it was. This song has so much depth to the sound that I was missing before. From the beginning of the song, more and more layers of the mix are added in as it progresses. Through my Audality wireless speakers, I can almost visualize where those soundbites are within the physical space. On my cheap Bluetooth speaker, it sounded flat.
What really blew my mind was the purposeful distortion of her voice and the bass together. On a lower quality speaker, it just sounded fuzzy to me, but when I listened on a pair of Audality S7s, I could hear the intentional distortion from Eilish’s voice travel through the bass and fade back out to normal. It sounds as if her voice passes through a tunnel of water, the bass follows and they distort together, and then they come out the other side and separate. This is extremely cool if you are lucky enough to hear it. I could also hear the finger snaps so clearly it sounded like they were in the room with me snapping along to her song.
I grew up in the revolution of wireless audio, so I understand that we can't go back to the traditional, wired system, but after hearing what's been missing, I can no longer settle for compressed, "lossy" audio. Bluetooth and WiFi speakers were great temporary solutions for wireless audio, but they simply are not capable of delivering uncompressed, high fidelity audio. Audality's WiC® wireless technology was designed specifically for audio, so you hear your music the way it was meant to be heard, everytime.
Why You Need High Resolution Audio