Internet music retailers offer millions of tunes, in every genre from opera to hip-hop to Palestinian folk songs. But it’s still hard to find online music that sounds good on a $10,000 stereo system.
Online music sellers like Apple Inc. and Amazon.com use digital compression to shrink the size of music files, making them easier to store and download. But compression also hollows out the music, eliminating many of the sonic subtleties cherished by hard-core audiophiles.
That’s why many finicky music lovers won’t sully their ears with today’s downloadable tunes and are clamoring for something better.
“Personally, I don’t even bother considering to download or buy anything from iTunes, Amazon, et cetera,” said Ed Sawyer, a 38-year-old Web applications developer in Dover, N.H. He’s willing to reconsider, but only if download sites offer more music in formats that don’t diminish the sound quality. “High fidelity of downloads is crucial in my world,” he said.
A handful of online music dealers, including Magnatune, MusicGiants Inc., and AIX Media Group Inc., are responding with audio downloads that match, and in some cases, exceed the quality of standard CDs.
“If you’re going to ask people to move from CDs to downloads, I think you have to have something that’s just as compelling,” said Magnatune’s founder, John Buckman.
Standard CD audio is stored in a digital format called WAV. But a typical WAV-format album takes up between 600 and 700 megabytes. Early in the decade, when music downloading first caught on, most people still had relatively small hard drives and slow dial-up connections, making it tedious and costly to download music.
Along came compression methods like MP3 and AAC. These can squeeze music files to about one-tenth their original size, but at a price. The system identifies sound frequencies that most people barely notice, and deletes them. The results are acceptable when heard through cheap speakers or headphones. But many people find that MP3 or AAC files don’t sound as rich and complex as WAV audio. So serious audiophiles keep buying CDs.
Purists need a new way to buy high-quality music, and recording companies need a new way to sell their wares. “You’re starting to see a lot of experimentation,” Atkinson said, “just to see what will actually stick with the buying public.”
Many of these experiments are happening online.
Magnatune, for example, is an independent label that offers classical, rock, and folk albums for as little as $5 each. Customers can download each album multiple times, and in multiple formats. MP3 and AAC are available, but buyers can also get uncompressed WAV files. These take longer to download, but this doesn’t matter so much when most customers have high-speed connections and huge hard drives. Buckman said most Magnatune customers download albums in WAV for playback on a home stereo and in MP3 for use on a portable player.
AIX of Los Angeles is even more passionate about sound quality. Its iTrax.com site offers about 35 rock, jazz, and classical albums in 18 formats, ranging from MP3 to six-channel surround-sound that far exceed the quality of a standard CD.
“One tune can be 600 megabytes,” said AIX founder Mark Waldrep. That’s about the size of an entire CD recorded in the WAV standard. A full album at iTrax can cost about $22, compared to the standard iTunes cost of $9.99, and can take hours to download.
“We do exist on the lunatic fringe,” Waldrep said. “There aren’t a lot of people out there making Ferraris, but there is a big profit margin on Ferraris.”
“I can’t imagine wasting time, energy, or money on anything compressed.”
