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Apple to download 24 bit in iTunes?

"We've gone back now at Universal, and we're changing our pipes to 24 bit. And Apple has been great," Iovine said. "We're working with them and other digital services -- download services -- to change to 24 bit. And some of their electronic devices are going to be changed as well. So we have a long road ahead of us."

CNN

Hopefully they use 96khz if they go through with it.
james63

Showing 2 responses by djohnson54

djohnson54
396 posts
 
I don't, for one minute, believe that the record companies are doing this for the benefit of consumers. We've seen this before - trying to convince us that we need to replace our current music collection with CD and then SACD/DVD-A (although they dropped the ball on that one) and our movies with DVD and now Blu-Ray. There's also the possibility that the hardware vendors (Apple?) are hoping to cash in on sales of a whole new generation of players since they've run out of new features in the current players to keep people upgrading.

Then there's the issue I was griping about in another thread where the music industry thinks they need to charge more for the higher resolution format when, in actuality, they have to do more work to DOWNSAMPLE the music from the native format it's stored in.
djohnson54
396 posts
 
Sinner,
I'm curious why digital music outlets haven't released tracks in 24bit from the git go...

I think it's due to the fact that not much mainstream hardware (i.e., iPods) exists to play it. Those of us who crave it are a niche market at best. A 24/96 copy of the master (which may have only been 24/96 to begin with) would be pretty awesome assuming they didn't feel the need to mess with/compress it. Hopefully HDTracks has started something with their sale of the uncompressed 24/96 remastered version of Paul McCartney's Band on the Run.

Even though I think it's ploy for the music industry to make more money, we audiophiles certainly stand to benefit from its success.
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