How we got here
Historically, recordings have been made with the best technology available. In the analog days, it was essential to use the best technology because every stage in the process added a little noise and reduced the overall quality. The advent of digital recording brought the promise of “perfect sound forever”, in that the original recording would not be degraded in the process of preparing and duplicating it. While the compact disk does a good job of preserving and reproducing the bits encoded in it, the recording industry discovered that to be able to edit a recording, especially on a Digital Audio Workstation, they needed more in the original recording than the 44.1 KHz 16 bit redbook CD format provided. On the recording side as technology improved it permitted both an increase in the bit depth (and associated dynamic range) and the sampling rate increased as much as four fold to get more information in the recording. This provided the improved source material necessary for quality editing. At the same time those in the industry immediately recognized that the higher resolution masters sounded much better than the released disks.
The failure of the old approach to new formats
There have been several efforts over the years to create new formats to make the higher quality recordings available to the public. These have all been unsuccessful in the market due to the huge change required from end to end to support the new formats. DVDA and SACD both have required new hardware at each end to work with a new disk requiring new machinery to manufacture and a major investment on the part of artists and producers to support a new and unproven market.
Moore’s Law to the rescue
Digital audio recording creates a lot of data. One minute of 44.1 KHz 16 bit audio will generate over 80 Megabits of data. High resolution recording can generate as much as 500 megabits in the same 60 seconds. In 1965 Gordon Moore of Intel described the rapid growth of the capabilities of an IC, essentially predicting a doubling of its capability every two years. This exponential growth of computing capability has fuelled many changed in our modern society. As integrated circuits improved dramatically and the computers built from them evolved into much higher powered devices they became very capable of managing the large quantities of data necessary for high resolution digital audio. With these developments the music industry moved from traditional dedicated recording and editing machines to personal computers to capture, edit and playback high resolution audio files. Hardware and software optimized for playing high resolution files has become much more common. It is now practical to use the same systems (Recordable CD’s, DVD’s and USB storage) used for passing data from computer to computer to make high resolution audio files accessible to the general public. The biggest virtue of this new approach is that it doesn’t require a new infrastructure, manufacturing process (like SACD or BluRay), or exotic new playback hardware like an SACD transport. The content can be distributed on ordinary data disks or even over the internet via downloadable files. And most important musicians and record producers can create and distribute the files easier and with less investment, which should make the much improved content available to more specific and narrow audiences.
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