Fraunhofer Pimps New HD-AAC Format |
Fraunhofer IIS is pimping its “new” HD-AAC format bigtime at CES. Fraunhofer claims the compressed HD-AAC digital music encoding format is sonically superior to 16bit/44.1kHz audio CDs.
(Via Future Music)
The blog ends with:
In reality, what difference is it going to make to a consumer to listen to 24 bit files with $20 earphones? Not much. And they sure has heck don’t want to pay extra licensing fees for a marginal fidelity increase. HD-ACC is Dead On Arrival.
I don’t think that necessarily true. HD-ACC (Fraunhofer web-link and PDF link) has several advantages:
– lossless
– scalable, meaning download the lossless version and easily scale to smaller file for portability
– 24 bit and 96kH… far better than CD
It could mean that the music-provider only needs to store the lossless version on their server, which then scales the file and delivers whichever quality the customer wants on the fly. Or the customer downloads the lossless version and scales the file him/herself.
Been wondering about private podcasts again. Mentioned it almost four years ago – here. Maybe that subscription podcast could be lossless, possibly delivered via a torrent…
PS: let’s just say I would like a paid podcast to be of higher quality than most podacasts, which are usually encoded at 128kbps. I would want the subscription to be, say, 320 kbps. I envision this podcast to be like a personal diary of creativity. It should include rough mixesand works in progress, as well as finished masters, my thoughts on the recording progress, photographs and maybe videos. In other words my total creative output of a year.
“Been wondering about private podcasts again. Mentioned it almost four years ago – here. Maybe that subscription podcast could be lossless, possibly delivered via a torrent…”
I would subscribe … unless it’s a torrent … my ISP (Comcast) throttles torrents.
Does it really? Well, I doubt a torrent would ever be an advisable way for an artist to run their private subscriptions, unless they were *really* lacking on server space (I think the Listening Lounge shows that OL isn’t) – too much reliance on users being around to seed the files. Unless there are LOTS of users (and even then, some sort of incentive to seed) it wouldn’t work out too well. You’d try to download a file and get nowhere.
Private subscriptions sound great, though. I remember you talking about the idea way, way back. I was excited about it then and I’m excited about it now!
Ottmar:
“PS: let’s just say I would like a paid podcast to be of higher quality than most podacasts, which are usually encoded at 128kbps. I would want the subscription to be, say, 320 kbps. I envision this podcast to be like a personal diary of creativity. It should include rough mixes and works in progress, as well as finished masters, my thoughts on the recording progress, photographs and maybe videos. In other words my total creative output of a year.”
I would subscribe to such a thing. Most definitely .. If you are “putting feelers” out there, you at least have one subscriber ..