By Chris Haslam

Published: Monday, 27 May 2024 at 09:04 AM


As any music lover will know, the big music streaming services such as Spotify or Apple Music offer an unprecedented music library, all at the touch of a few buttons. But, as any audiophile will counter, what you gain in ease of use from the streamers, you typically lose in audio quality. Yes, the MP3 music file has fundamentally changed the way we all listen to music. Set it alongside a CD recording, however, and you’ll notice that the MP3 doesn’t offer the same amount of detail in the recording. The solution did seem to have arrived with the advent of hi-res audio digital recordings.

The problem with these, though, was that they took up huge amounts of space on your hard drive. Download just a few albums and you’d quickly be stretched for space. Not, in short, a sustainable long-term answer.

That’s all changed now, though, thanks to the costs of data storage coming down and our wi-fi speeds going up. Now, hi-res audio is at last becoming accessible to ordinary listeners. We can all now enjoy studio-quality recordings at the click of a mouse.

Here all you need to know as you enter the wonderful world of hi-res audio.