High-resolution audio is a new industry marketing term...
Just yesterday, the Consumer Electronic Association in partnership with Sony Electronics and Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, and Sony Music announced a broad push for HRA. Everybody wins if it catches on: Hardware manufacturers get to sell new specialized hardware, and the labels get to (try) to sell you their back catalog all over again. And if the music sounds better, you might even win as well.
...as a response to low-quality MP3s and earbuds...
The HRA push is all about making high-quality files as accessible and as universally supported as MP3s have been for more than a decade. The masses walking down the street listening to Mp3s through EarPods might be rocking out, but they're listening to some of the worst audio quality in generations.
Both MP3s and EarPods are convenient and portable perversions of audio quality. MP3s are small files and EarPods are cheap, so we don't mind that they suck. Indeed, most people-even you!-will notice a significant improvement in the sound reproduction by using either better hardware or better source files. And really, the better gear means nothing without better files. That's where high-resolution comes in.
...which means higher-resolution audio than CD quality...
If the diagnosis of the iPod generation's music problem is pretty straightforward, the solution isn't a simple file type or a single piece of hardware. Unlike video's Ultra HD, which denotes a specific image resolution, audio formats and resolutions adopted by audiophiles abound and so HRA doesn't have a literal spec or definition. Here's what the CEA said when I asked them for one.
CEA does not have a specific definition for high resolution audio. We may have a better sense of a definition as manufacturers and record labels make related announcements in the coming months.
The aforementioned major labels and Sony Electronics have agreed that HRA means "higher resolution" than 44.1 kHz/16-bit audio. The audio sampling rate could 48 kHz or 192 kHz. Sony's new HRA hardware promises to support everything no matter what.
...that some people say sounds better than CDs...
There are legions of audiophiles who insist that even CD quality was a compromise. Rather than rip uncompressed or lossless audio from CDs, these enthusiasts want to go back to the source material and rip as much data as they possibly can out of it. Much like the people who yearn for the sound of vinyl records, these people insist there are perceivable differences between a 192 kHz/24-bit and 44.1 kHz/16-bit digital sources. People use adjectives like soundstage, texture, warmth to describe the difference. It's all very subjective, but there are so many people who hear it, that the difference must be there right?
...while others disagree...
Objectively, CD quality is as good as it gets. People who think high-resolution audio is silly point out that it's impossible for anything to sound better than CD quality. The CD's 44.1 kHz sampling rate with 16-bit depth isn't some random number devised by the Philips Corporation to ruin our ears. Without going too deeply into the sampling theory behind how they came up with those numbers, suffice it to say that to human ears 44.1/16 audio is mathematically perfect sound reproduction. Audio codec expert Monty Montgomery explained this at length last year when news broke about Neil Young's plans to promote 192kHz/24-bit audio. He concludes:
Why push back against 24/192? Because it's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, a business model based on willful ignorance and scamming people.
...but either way it might end up making things better
We won't go as far as Montgomery, and in fact, there's a good chance that the push for high-resolution audio is a good thing for your ears. HRA is overkill that nobody can afford-even if it really is better-but maybe its existence will make people aware of options within their reach. Good hardware and CD-quality source material is eminently affordable-just like it was twenty years ago.
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