mp3s to sound as good as CDs

mp3s to sound as good as CDs

20 March, 2009 | 3.02AM

• Written by: Terry Church
• Filed under: Music News:

Here is the news that digital DJs have been waiting for since the dawn of the digital music era: Thomson, one of the original developers behind mp3 technology, today announced a new member to their mp3 family that offers ultimate audio quality thanks to its lossless compression.

The new mp3HD encoder, believe it or not, offers the creation of mp3HD files out of stereo material in wav form at 16-bit precision and 44.1Khz.

What does that all mean? The days of people complaining about mp3s sounding worse than CDs or vinyl are over.

“Over the past years, most of the music download services have adopted mp3 as their format of choice. By introducing this new mp3HD format, Thomson enables users and content providers to enjoy ultimate audio quality while preserving the convenience of the mp3 format,” said Rocky Caldwell, General Manager of mp3 and Audio Licensing for Thomson.

The new mp3HD format allows mathematically lossless compression of audio material while preserving backward compatibility to the mp3 standard.

The special files are mp3-compliant files that include additional side information, which, together with the mp3 portion of the file, can be decoded by an mp3HD-capable decoder. Standard mp3 players can simply play the mp3 portion of the file. As such, mp3HD files are larger in files size than mp3s.

At this point it’s impossible to tell how the electronic industry will react to the availability of the new mp3HD technology, but it will require all the digital format dependent businesses to adopt the new files before it come become standard.

We here at Beatport have been investigating mp3HD technology since the beta period and have been evaluating whether it would be possible to sell mp3HDs in the future. Lossless quality files have of course been available on Beatport for years as wavs.

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