The future of digital Audio

In this paper I will discuss the future of the digital media formats for the playback and enjoyment of music and why we should use digital technology to reproduce all music in its intended pristine and uncompressed form. Since mankind realized we were a deep, complex and musical beings we have found ways to reproduce the music that lay deep within mans soul. In order for us to discuss the future of digital playback formats for music we must take a short trip in the way back machine and talk about the beginning of media playback. In the beginning there was vinyl and vinyl came in a few different varieties, tubes, spindles, and our old favorite and current retro trend vinyl discs. These were the powerful beginnings of recorded sound and music. Sound and music were put on to vinyl media with a magnetically charged diamond cutting stylus which cut grooves into the disk or cylinder so one could play the media back in a similar fashion by transferring the information cut into the grooves back to a needle that ran over the groove, and transmitted back to a speaker or horn. After and during vinyl we then found a format which produced much higher fidelity recordings, in the form of magnetic tape. Magnetic tape is chock full of ferrous metal which is then magnetically charged, music passes through that current, and on to the tape itself where the ferrous metal becomes agitated and accepts the sound and thus is recorded onto the tape. In most cases music or sound recorded to tape was used for the master copy of the performance, and vinyl was still used to distribute the intellectual product to the consumer. Tape came in many different forms, from exotic 4 formats to 2 1 and down to the dominant playback medium for the consumer from the late 70s to the early 90s cassette tapes. As computers became more and more prevalent in our everyday lives we created what was heralded as one of mans

greatest media creations in the invention of the compact disc. The compact disc is the original form of digital music for consumer playback. The compact disc format uses a laser to transmit digital data from the computer and burns the information onto the disc itself, which is then played back through compact disc players which read the digital information with that same laser. The compact disc is the beginning of the current evolutionary rise of the digital playback mediums. The compact disc reproduces recorded media at a sampling rate of 44.1 KHZ (kilohertz) and at a computer bit depth of 16 bits. Even though this revolutionized the quality of music playback it has also become the crux of the fundamental problem we are encountering today in the evolution of the digital playback medium. In the present day we as consumers still live in a 44.1 16 bit world due to compact disc, and its portable, sharable little brother the MP3. Even though the encoding process involved in turning music into the MP3 format does not look at bit depth, it definitely looks at the sampling rate in which the computer that the music was recorded on uses to correctly reproduce the audio image that is transferred from the real world, to the digital world and back again. We could easily go one for days about the process in which music is digitized and how that all works, but our mission right now is to simply state why an uncompressed 24 bit 96 KHZ audio format is superior to the MP3 or AAC encoder which is the algorithm used to produce iTunes files that live on our iPods. Although many different sample rates are used to record and reproduce professional music and sound the professional standard seems to be a sampling rate of 24 bits and 96KHZ. This is extremely important in recreating the intended vision of the artist. In laymens terms the amount of bits used correlate to the amount of decibels the computer can reproduce and send back to the analog world. 24 bits= 144 decibels in dynamic range, and 96KHZ is how many

times a second the audio is sampled by the computer to ensure the full preservation and fidelity of the recorded audio. This being said, the lower the sample rate, and the lower the bit depth means that there is a loss in audio quality and fidelity. Not only do we lose quality at 16 bits we lose the reproduction of dynamic range of the original signal. Music that was recorded with a possible decibel ceiling of 144 is now reduced to 96 decibels at 16 bits. So what does this mean for consumers? In all actuality it doesnt mean much for the average consumer because the average consumer is more concerned about the portability, ease of download, and amount of storage one can achieve with a compressed digital format on their hard drives. As far as we are concerned in this paper all portable music and media players are just tiny hard drives with an interface to playback music and media. These players were not designed to handle lossless media formats. The main reason an IPod, I phone, and other media players built into our phones arent built to handle lossless formats is due to the fact that those formats would take up far too much of the limited hard drive space of these devices. But as far as artists and audiophiles alike are concerned a highly compressed format does not ensure that the consumer hears exactly what the artist heard when they decided to print, release, and distribute the music. Before the death of Apple founder and CEO Steve Jobs he had been in contact with musical legend and social reform icon Neil Young in an attempt to produce a lossless playback format which is about the same size as an iTunes file. (Chris Foresman, ITunes may upgrade to 24-bit files but why bother?, ARS Technica.com, February 1st 2012) This would make it possible to finally get closer to bringing the artist and the fan infinitely closer by enhancing the vicarious relationship of fan to artist by allowing the fan to listen to the same exact digital reproduction that moved the artist to share it with the rest of the world. Some would say that fans dont care about the exact reproduction of art. But one wouldnt want to look at a

grainy image of a Vangoh or Picasso, would they? The fact of the matter is that art in all forms has moved us to become not just better individuals, but a better race of human beings, and we should not have to sacrifice artistic vision for accessibility. This is why it is vital that we pioneer a pristine accessible audio format for all to purchase and enjoy.