The race for high-quality sound: services compared
Over the past few months we’ve seen an increasing number of digital music services take steps towards providing higher quality audio to their end users. The success of Neil Young’s Pono initiative appears to have kick-started a race towards better quality audio in the market.
____
Pono
Neil Young’s project Pono promised to revolutionise the way people listen to music allowing them to hear exactly what the artists can hear in the studio. Young stated that they are going back to the original master tapes for a lot of the releases that are going to be on the store, with sound quality expected to be as high as 24 bits at 192 kHz. It is unclear at the moment whether the Pono store will accept lower resolution audio. The Pono store website is live and contains some previews but no music is yet available for purchase.
Wimp
Wimp was the first company to launch a large-scale high-quality streaming service in September 2013. The company’s users in Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Poland were given the option to pay twice as much as the “normal” quality offering in order to access music at CD quality (44.1 kHz / 16 bit). The success of the initiative led Wimp to develop TIDAL a service that will be launching a in the US and the UK late this Autumn and that will only have the high-quality option (costing $19.99 or £19.99 per month).
Deezer
Deezer has also entered high-quality audio space by announcing Deezer Elite, which is available at a premium around the world but also represents the first foray of the company into the US market thanks to a partnership with Sonos. Deezer Elite also provides users with CD-quality streams at 44.1 kHZ / 16 bit.
Rdio
Rdio recently announced the the conversion of its entire music library to AAC files, which offer better sound than MP3s. The company’s highest bit rate for the AAC files is 320 Kbps.
Spotify
Spotify uses the Ogg Vorbis format and also offers a maximum bit rate of 320 Kbps.
____
It is likely that we will see more streaming services offer a “super-premium” option allowing those who are interested to stream CD-quality tracks. After all most digital services receive uncompressed music from distributors and then compress it using their internal systems so the only issue in terms of infracstructure is making sure their servers can cope with the extra load. The commercial question is whether offering this option is worth the headache, especially as a service like Spotify that is starting to break into the mainstream may be weary of offering a third option (Free, Premium and Super-Premium) that could confuse consumers.
Less likely - at least in the short term - is the advent of high-definition streaming services using files like those that will be eventually sold on the Pono music store. Most recordings are not readily available at resolutions higher than 44.1 kHZ / 16 bit so inventory is a big issue. In addition, labels are keen to capitalise on their effort to re-ingest those master tapes at a higher definition by selling the resulting files at a premium. This makes sense as these “ultimate definition” files may also well be the very last time labels are able to find a way to sell the same albums to consumers (for a 4th or 5th time - see vinyl, tape, CD, MP3).
What is still hard to define is how interested the mainstream market is in high-quality music, that’s a question that will be answered over the next 12 months as we look at the performance of PONO, Wimp and TIDAL.
(Andrea Leonelli)