Apple Music, Pandora, and Spotify are just a few of the many, many online streaming music services that let you listen to your favorite songs and compositions while in the office, making the morning or evening commute, or just sitting in the laundromat watching clothes dry. They’re a musical convenience.
That said, that musical convenience comes at a price beyond the monthly subscription fees. The streaming music services typically compress the audio into smaller, more manageable files that are easily streamed. For most people, MP3- or CD-quality audio gets the job done, but folks with a thirst for supreme audio—audiophiles—may want to investigate online music services that deliver Hi-Res Audio.
Hi-Res Audio, as defined by The Recording Industry Association of America (and its Consumer Electronics Association, DEG: The Digital Entertainment Group, and The Recording Academy Producers & Engineers Wing partners), is “lossless audio capable of reproducing the full spectrum of sound from recordings which have been mastered from better than CD quality (48kHz/20-bit or higher) music sources which represent what the artists, producers and engineers originally intended.”
In other words, Hi-Res Audio aims to deliver sound that comes close to what you’d hear in a recording studio. That’s a big promise. In fact, Xiph.org, a non-profit dedicated to protecting the internet from private interests, claims that the entire affair is hogwash and shenanigans. Tim Gideon, a PCMag Contributing Editor and audio expert, is also somewhat skeptical, but from a logistics point of view. We’ll explain.
As Gideon said to me in an email, “the issue is: What else is part of the signal chain? Hi-Res Audio through laptop speakers or crappy earbuds will not sound like Hi-Res Audio, and even really decent speakers may not be able to convey the subtleties.”
Still, Gideon suspects that if everyone had an amazing sound system and listened exclusively to Hi-Res Audio for year, that they’d hear a difference when listening to CD-quality tunes through the same system. “The ears get used to things,” he said. “Even if I am skeptical now, there’s no doubt that down the road, streaming quality will be what we currently consider Hi-Res Audio. But by then, we’ll have maybe have raised the bar again and Hi-Res Audio will have a new meaning or be outdated.”
Regardless of where you stand on the Hi-Res Audio issues, what’s indisputable is that there is a small, but growing number, of online sources to stream this music standard. We highlight four of them below. So, grab a quality set of headphones or fire up a home sound system and explore what Hi-Res Audio offers.
