Industry Opinion: Are Audio Quality and Convenience Mutually Exclusive?
By Yasmin Hashmi, www.hiddenwires.co.uk

With downloading and streaming having revolutionised music consumption, it appears that bandwidth issues will still have a significant impact on the size of files and so the ultimate quality of audio. But is this necessarily always so?

We asked a number of leading lights whether convenience and quality must always be mutually exclusive when it comes to audio in and around the home. Here are their replies:

Phil Hansen, Operations and Marketing Manager, British Audio-Visual Dealers Association (BADA)

Ever since the beginnings of the audio industry the march of technology has brought ever greater convenience to the music lover. 78s on a wind-up gramophone meant they could, pretty well for the first time, enjoy recordings of famous music from around the world in their own homes. Adding an electric motor to the gramophone brought added convenience, as did the development of 33 1/3rpm mono records with their extended playing time and much enhanced quality. The development of stereo improved the sound quality even further and then the introduction of cassette tapes brought stereo music to the portable and automotive world - a huge leap forwards in terms of convenience. Then the world went digital with the introduction of CDs in the early 80s which was a transformation in terms of quality and accessibility for the music lover. Now they could have crystal clear, scratch- and hiss-free music at home, on the move and in the car. Forgetting the audiophile arguments of vinyl versus CD which raged at the time, the perceived quality was, for the average consumer, leaps and bounds ahead. All was good until someone invented digital compression.

There is no doubt whatsoever that accessibility to music is greater now than it has ever been before. The mp3 and its kin have revolutionised not only the replay of music but the entire music industry. For the user, having the convenience of 10,000 tracks on something the size of a cigarette packet, which can be streamed throughout the house, taken anywhere, and kept up-to-date and in sync via the cloud, is a massive step forwards in convenience. But it is, as anyone who has heard it compared to the formats that preceded it, hugely inferior in terms of sound quality.

Consumers want convenience, we live in a 'now' society and everything has to be available on demand whenever and wherever we want it, without any complications. And for the audio industry this is a real challenge. We have been banging the drum for quality audio for years and will continue to do so, but we have to adapt to the modern technologies that consumers demand. It is very encouraging to see so many of our manufacturers enthusiastically grabbing the digital music file storage, playback and streaming opportunity and doing it with their usual careful attention to audio quality. The use of newer compression formats such as FLAC and Apple Lossless or uncompressed AIFF and WAV means that digital music with all its convenience factors, and audio quality, do not have to be mutually exclusive. All we need to do now is educate people.

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