Neil Young: Hi-Res Music is 'The Future.' What's the Freakin' Holdup?

And i was beginning to consider that I was the only music quality snob? I just don't understand the point of people having to pay for music and getting no benefit (besides fines etc.) like more quality. MP3's are a horrible means to format music. There is a reason why guitarist spend their whole career working out there guitar tone, and the drummers really give a damn how many ply's of wood their drums have, and why live music and vinyl music sounds so much better, it's because our digital comparison sounds like garbage. and we have the technology but the market is more concerned with having 60,000 songs then they are having 30,000 good ones.

Currently the best available digital downloads can only be found on the Torrent sites.

Good news Neil, your fans are listening to 320Kbs FLAC. Bad news, they're not paying for it!

Neil has a great idea, but with the ISPs throttling movie downloads and the like, adding high rez audio to the mix will make things tougher on the end user. Legislation is needed to throttle the greedy ISPs!!

Nice Blog !!!

Release in downloadable format too hopefully, not all of us want to buy Blu-Ray players.

Ironic that the advancement of technology leads to music formats worse than vinyl 40 years old. Kind of like tv being downgraded instead of going to high def.

My kid never heard quality audio until I played one of her songs on a seriously good stereo (carver, b&w speakers), after that she wanted to toss her IPOD.

I think the key will be to make the HiRez format convenient and compatible with the *average* consumers *lifestyle*. I simply adore my SACDs and DVD-A discs, but if I want to loan them to a friend to hear, or listen in the car, etc, I'm out of luck. By placing DRM as a priorty, the industry hobbled SACD. Of course, if really good speakers were a bit more affordable, it might help some folks to *see the light*. No sense having Hi-Res source with crappy speakers.

The problem here is that the existing CD format -- 16 bits sampled 44100 times per second -- is teetering on the knife's edge of human perception. There's really not much more resolution to be heard.

Very few people can detect frequencies above the 22050KHz upper limit of an audio CD, and during music (which involves much lower & louder masking sounds) these higher frequencies would very likely be COMPLETELY inaudible.

24 bit audio is similarly unnecessary for music playback. The noise floor of 16 bit recordings is rarely ever heard, even in quiet classical passages.

Excuse me, that was 22050Hz not KHz. >.>;;
Also, to put it in a visual perspective: If we had 19" monitors with 16,000 x 12,000 resolution, sure you COULD make a higer res 160,000 x 120,000 screen... but would you ever be able to see the difference?

Neil knows what he's talking about. CDs and CD players come with inherent sonic limitations that have nothing to do with the bit rate. The spinning disc creates a noise that has to be accounted for in the algorithm and the D/A converters in most consumer grade audio products are mediocre at best. These unspoken limitations in the media itself that have nothing to do with the sampling rate. And, yes, higher resolutions will bring out more detail in sound recordings where they exist. If you've ever seen a professional photograph in the flesh, you can tell the difference when you look at yr own digital photos. The problem is that most consumers think MP3s at 128KB are just fine. However, I concede there is little hope that folks are interested in the benefits one way or the other.