Is Sound Quality of iTunes Plus "Amazing" Enough?

Business Week ^ | May 30, 2007 | Peter Burrows

[jdm]

Apple announced iTunes Plus today, where anyone can buy DRM-free tunes with "amazing" 256 kpbs sound quality for $1.29 versus the typical $.99 per song. This is great news--and not only because it takes advantage of EMI's decision to free music lovers from the shackles of digital rights management. In the long-run, I think the question of audio quality is also going to become far more important.

Yes, I know--fidelity is far down the list of most consumer's priorities. Conventional wisdom is that it only matters to audiofiles who have convinced themselves they can hear a difference. That may be true for the most part, but I think it's also because we consumers are still so taken with the advantages of digital, such as price, convenience, mobility and device-independance.

But what about in the future? In the long run--or maybe the short--given the scary rate at which CD sales are imploding--people aren't just going to want digital music when they're listening via earbuds (on which bit rate is less important, because the speakers aren't good enough to exploit higher bit rates). Instead, we're going to want our entire music libraries to be maintained in CD-less form, whether inside our hard drives or out in the cloud hosted at some music service. And we're going to want to listen to it on everything from the laptop to the fancy home theater or stereo. At that point, many of us--I'd bet most of us--are going to start hankering for the same high-quality audio that we used to enjoy with CDs and vinyl, particularly once the novelty of getting music via internet wears off.

So is 256 kbps encoding good enough? While experts say it's hard to equate a bit rate with sound quality, this level of compression gets closer to CD-quality.

[JamesP81]

Personally, I think the speaker system matters more than the bitrate. I know for a fact that my iTunes songs sound significantly better on my computer’s speakers / sound card than they do burned to CD on my car stereo. So either my computer speakers are better than my car stereo’s speakers, or something is lost in the CD burning process and I need to get an iPod for my car...