MusicGiants and iTrax give Internet music downloads an audiophile makeover

Say what you will about the ethical and legal issues surrounding peer-to-peer music trading, but back in the good old days of Napster, Gnutella and other such illicit music download services, sound quality mattered.

So whether you were rebelling against buying Rumours on yet another new format (and, just for the record I have to say, “Shame on you”) or you just wanted a digital copy of a CD you already owned and your copy of Audiograbber was on the fritz, it didn’t take much effort to find your favorite tunes ripped in high-quality 256- or 320-kilobit-per-second (kbps) MP3, or even full CD-quality FLAC if you played your cards right.

But as with drag queens, Traci Lords, and Devil worship, when digital music downloads finally went legit, something essential was lost in the process. In fact, the runaway success of iTunes—with its bottom-of-the-barrel bitrates—led many pundits to declare that sound quality was no longer relevant at all. The teeming masses, it seems, were perfectly fine with overly compressed, warbled sound, so long as it meant they could fit twice as many songs in their pockets.

Recently the pendulum has begun to swing the other way, though. These days, the MP3 downloads offered by most major online retailers tip the scales at an impressive 256 kbps—double the standard bitrate of just a few years back—and the powers that be at iTunes, long the whipping boys of the audiophile crowd, are making a concerted effort to convert more and more of their offerings to 256-kbps AAC. The era of near-CD quality downloads may finally be upon us.

Is near-CD quality good enough, though? For a small but significant percentage of listeners, the answer is a resounding no, and a number of online retailers—led by MusicGiants.com and iTrax.com—are responding by delivering even higher-quality downloads directly to the hard drives of those discerning digital audiophiles who will accept no less than the best.

“When there were constraints on bandwidth, and storage was a little more expensive, there was probably a better argument for more compression,” says MusicGiants CEO, Scott Bahneman. “But storage is becoming cheap and download speeds are much higher, so it just doesn’t seem to make sense to give up the sound quality that you lose with all the compression.”

Music Giants.com

Like most online music download retailers, MusicGiants features a mix of hot new releases and old favorites: The latest releases from Mariah Carey and Panic at the Disco share virtual shelf space with catalog titles from ABBA to ZZ Top and just about anyone you can think of in between.

The difference is that while the typical music store offers up their tunes in lossy compressed formats—which keep files sizes manageable by throwing away sound deemed to be sonically unimportant or less important to our ears—MusicGiants relies on Windows Media Audio Lossless technology to reduce file sizes by a third to two-thirds—resulting in bitrates between 500 and 1000 kbps or so, as opposed to the full 1411 kbps of a fully uncompressed CD-quality bitstream—while still delivering 100% of the sonic information to your amps and speakers that the original CD would.

Of course, that extra audio quality does come at a slight premium: MusicGiants sells its songs for $1.29, compared to the $0.99 a pop from iTunes, Amazon, et al. “We charge about 30% more for a 700% increase in sound quality,” Bahneman says with a laugh.

Then again, most audiophiles will be quick to remind you that CDs don’t exactly represent the pinnacle of audio quality. “We found that many people weren’t satisfied with the quality coming off the typical CD,” Bahneman says. “So, since we were already pushing back in the other direction”—against the low-fi trend—“we decided to push even further and create WMA Lossless files from DVD-Audio and SACD. So we now have 24-bit files playing at 96 kHz, which equates to upwards of 10,000 to 11,000 kbps, instead of just 1000 kbps.”

But given how spectacularly DVD-Audio and SACD failed, how does MusicGiants plan to succeed offering essentially exactly the same content? “I think those formats failed because you had the chicken and egg problem, with [consumers] saying, ‘When there’s more content, I’ll go buy the gear,’ and people on the content side saying, ‘When there’s more people with the gear, we’ll start to mix for it.’

“But we don’t need a special player. You can take any computer that runs Windows XP or newer, plug in a good sound card, and any old PC—it could be the oldest, crappiest PC in your house—will play this stuff. And you’ve got 30 million people in America with 5.1 surround systems, put in for movies and television. So the hardware is there. When you directly compare one to the other, people always choose quality. If people really get the chance to experience it, there’s no contest. It’s three-dimensional, it’s rich, it’s warm, it reminds people of vinyl—it’s just spectacular.”

iTrax.com

Music download website iTrax.com was founded by Mark Waldrep, Ph.D, who is also the President of AIX Records. iTrax distributes AIX’s proprietary audiophile recordings in downloadable form. Waldrep agrees that DVD-Audio and SACD were failures, but not necessarily for the same reasons.

“Truthfully, an awful lot of the material that came out wasn’t much different from what people already had,” he says. “I know for a fact, because I did some of the work under the table, that some companies would take a CD, extract a 5.1 mix, up-sample it to 96 kHz, put it back in the box and slap a DVD-Audio sticker on it. And they flooded the market with those. It was B.S.”

Waldrep’s intent obviously isn’t to disparage the work of MusicGiants: “I fully acknowledge that the classics we grew up with need to be digitally delivered in the best quality that’s available. That’s what they’re doing. You can’t, however, put that on the same level as a newly recorded high-definition recording, which is why I say that real high-definition material has to be recorded in front of equipment capable of those kinds of specs. For the guys who love Miles’ Kind of Blue, fine, the vinyl sounds better than the CD. But if I had been at that session, with my equipment, it would blow the doors off the vinyl. We can do better. We can absolutely do better. And when I demonstrate that to people, they get it. But how can I deliver my recordings to people?”

For years, Waldrep’s only available vehicles were the award-winning double-sided DVD-Audio/Video discs for which AIX Records is known. Discs such as John McEuen and Jimmy Ibbotson’s Nitty Gritty Surround and Laurence Juber’s Guitar Noir set the standard for the DVD-Audio format as a whole with multiple 5.1 surround sound mixes and the sort of breathtaking fidelity that borders on disturbing realism.

But these days, it’s simply quicker, easier, and more economically sensible for Waldrep to offer his unparalleled digital recordings online, side-by-side in Dolby Digital, DTS, WMA Pro, WMA Lossless, and full uncompressed PCM format (with MP3 there, as well, simply for the sake of comparison).

And even if iTrax never approaches the success of iTunes, that’s fine with Waldrep. “Not everybody cares about quality, but some do,” Waldrep says. “The truth is, I’m a university professor who doesn’t really care if he’s making a ton of money in the record business because I can pay my bills otherwise, but at the end of the day, what I’m doing is proof of concept. True high-definition digital recordings are the way of the future, and digital delivery of music is a billboard you can see three miles away. This is so obviously the future of audiophile media and media delivery that it’s just impossible for me to imagine anybody still holding onto a two-channel vinyl playback system for their den.”

For Dennis' top picks from these sites, check out hifiTunes.

Amazon: Amazon.com
iTrax: itrax.com
iTunes: Apple.com/itunes
MusicGiants: Musicgiants.com
Napster: Napster.com

Hear no Evil

Can the average listener actually hear the difference between standard and high-quality digital music files? That was the question posed by a recent test conducted by the science blog Cognitive Daily (tinyurl.com/4e9sqf). Participants were asked to listen to MP3 rips of two different songs, at three different bitrates, and assign them a number based on perceived quality. No limits were placed on the number of times each clip could be played, and participants were asked to describe their listening environments, note any musical training, and rate their interest in audio quality on a 9-point scale.

The results (tinyurl.com/3a3tcs) are interesting, no matter which side of the debate you find yourself on, and could be spun in two very different ways. It turns out that the average participant was unable to perceive any difference in quality between MP3s encoded at 128 kbps and those encoded at 256 kbps. In fact, with classical music the overall quality rating for the 128 kbps sample was slightly higher than the 256 kbps sample, indicating that many participants simply rated one sample higher at random. Out of nearly 700 participants, 33—fewer than five percent—were able to consistently identify the higher-quality encoding. Interestingly enough, though, there was a statistically significant correlation between those who were able to hear the difference and those who described themselves as audiophiles.

Of course, the listening conditions of participants weren’t monitored and the test didn’t include true CD-quality (or better) recordings, so one could argue that the results aren’t 100% applicable here. But a few general conclusions can still be drawn: while the average listener probably doesn’t get much if any benefit out of higher quality digital music files, a small but significant percentage do. And if you've read this far, it's safe to say you're probably one of the ones that does.