Unchained melody

Sound recording has come a long way since its discovery hundreds of years ago. While the methods of recording sound may vary, the objective has not changed: the playback should be an accurate reproduction of the recorded sound.

While Thomas Edison’s phonograph showed the world how to record sound, Emile Berliner’s gramophone demonstrated that recording and playing back sound could be done several notches better.

Since then, the recording/music industry has tried to perfect capturing sound with unquestioned fidelity. My parents’ era was said to be the “golden age of music.” This was the generation that spawned musical geniuses such as Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, the Beatles and Michael Jackson, among others. And boy, music felt almost like a religion at the time!

But as the technology focused more on convenience, with contraptions producing music becoming more compact, there was a degradation that was all too palpable for an audiophile not to notice. When the CD tried to remove the hiss that came with vinyl recording, the result was a disastrous oversimplification of the dynamic range. Much of the musical information got lost in digital translation. The Super Audio CD (SACD), XRCD, and DVD audio — they all tried but failed to sound close to vinyl playback. These musical formats virtually chained melodies to digital rules.

Even worse was the advent of the MP3, which further degraded musical recording and playback. 

Nobuyoshi Otake, managing director and president of Sony Philippines, however, believes that High Resolution Audio (HRA) is the answer.

HRA refers to audio that has a higher sampling frequency and bit depth than CD, and usually has a sampling frequency or 96 kHz or 192 kHz at 24-bit. HRA consists mostly of formats with lossless compression, such as FLAC and ALAC, which are both compressed in a way that does not compromise quality.

 “When you listen to music in HRA,” Otake says, “you will be able to identify its superior sound quality over that of MP3, boasting greater detail and sound texture, and bringing realistic audio playback of ground-shaking lows to delicate highs. It presents to you music characteristics that is as close to original recording as possible, just as artists intended it to.”

Sony has in fact launched a number of products to meet the demands of people who want the very best in music playback quality, at home or when on the move. Otake cites the Walkman NWZ-ZX1 as a high-performance portable music player that allows the listener to experience the music as how the artist originally intended.

Here is a brief explanation to help you understand file formats:

Uncompressed audio files are the exact copies of the original data that take up more space than compressed formats. Some examples are WAV, AIFF, AU or raw header-less PCM.

Formats with lossless compression are those that use mathematical algorithms to encode data in such a way that details of the data can be restored to their former state without any audio degradation at all. Examples of these are Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC), Monkey’s Audio (filename extension APE), True Audio Lossless (TTA), Adaptive Transform Acoustic Coding (ATRAC), Apple Lossless Audio Codec (ALAC filename extension m4a), Windows Media Audio Lossless (WMA Lossless), etc.

Formats with lossy compression are those where quality has been sacrificed in the reduction of the file size. Examples are MP3, Vorbis, Musepack, AAC, ATRAC and Windows Media Audio Lossy (WMA lossy).

But is HRA really the answer? Will it finally unchain beautiful melodies from the choke of digital rules? I have yet to evaluate one, but visitors to the recently concluded Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas, U S A, were all agog about HRA products on display.

According to Otake, nowadays digital music players are affordable and easily available. “From wireless speakers to waterproof music players, we are constantly spoilt for choices, even in the quality of music presented to us,“ he explains. “Digital music players are now able to store files of higher capacity and are compatible with so many more audio formats, enabling us to listen to tunes that are of high quality, and ensuring that the quality of sound is not compromised no matter how many audio files are stored in the device.”

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For comments or questions, please email me at audioglow@yahoo.com. You can also visit www.wiredstate.com for quick answers to your audio concerns.