The idea was to see if people could tell the difference. They would play back HD audio files from very high-end hardware, but occasionally reduce that quality to 44.1 kHz/16 bit (audio CD quality). Moran did a blind test on a series of listeners over a period of time.

These HD tracks are usually in formats such as WAV, AIFF, ALAC and FLAC.īut can the human ear really make out the difference between high-quality MP3s and HD music tracks? In a 2007 paper, titled Audibility Of A CD-Standard A/DA/A Loop Inserted Into High-Resolution Audio Playback, published in the Journal Of The Audio Engineering Society, E. These tracks are then saved through lossless compression, so that there is no loss of quality or detailing, and each track size is much larger than a traditional MP3 or CD-quality track.

In digital music recordings, HD audio means at least 48 kHz/24 bit, going up to 96 kHz/24 bit or 192 kHz/24 bit (see “Understanding the numbers').

It is generally accepted that the human ear can hear frequencies between 20 Hz and 20 kHz, with the maximum audibility limit being 135 dB. HD audio is generally defined as an audio recording that has been captured during a studio session, with hardware capable of matching or exceeding the perceived limitations of human hearing. But the sudden popularity of high-definition (HD) music (also known as high-resolution music or lossless music) is making people sit up and take notice of the PonoPlayer (and its online music store) and the forthcoming Sony Walkman-two of the most talked about devices among music enthusiasts. The bigger benefit, of course, is that this takes up less space and is playable on smartphones and tablets, and on a variety of music players. It is essentially a way of compressing audio tracks into smaller sizes. Broach the topic of music downloads and most users would list the MP3 format as their preference.

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