Compiled By Yusuff A.Z

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CHANCES are that even if you have taken the plunge and started building a digital music collection, you have never had to tangle with the word “bitrate.” That may be about to change.

Multimedia Samples from the 9ice song "Gongo Aso" at different bitrates: 64 Kilobits per second (mp3)128 Kbps (mp3)256 Kpbs (mp3)

The Apple iTunes store, the largest seller of music downloads, began selling tracks from EMI Music without any restrictions on copying, for a slightly higher price than usual, $1.29 instead of 99 cents. To sweeten the deal, those tracks have better sound, with a bitrate of 256 kilobits per second (kbps), up from the standard 128 kbps. Apple has gone so far as to say that this results “in audio quality indistinguishable from the original recording.”


So what exactly is a bitrate?

Simply put, it is a measure of the amount of data used to represent each second of music. A higher number means that more sonic information can be used to recreate the sound. To careful listeners, or those with good audio equipment, more data can make a big difference.

Last fall, Dr. Naresh Patel, a physician in Fort Wayne, Ind., moved into a home he designed with his wife, Valerie. It has a home theater, complete with projector, surround-sound speakers and a high-end amplification system. The sonic centerpiece is two Bowers & Wilkins loudspeakers that cost Dr. Patel $12,000 “with a discount.”

It was all working beautifully until Dr. Patel connected his iPod to the system. Sitting down in the theater’s sweet spot to enjoy his music, he was instead appalled.

“I couldn’t believe what I heard,” he said. “You don’t need a trained ear to hear the complete lack of so many things: imaging, the width and the depth of the sound stage. It almost sounded monaural, like listening to music in mono. The clarity, silkiness, the musicality of the music, if you will, was not there.”

The problem was compression — the process of removing audio data to fit the music into a smaller file. Compressed audio making audiophiles crinkle their noses is not surprising, nor is it new. It has its roots in the debate of the 1980s, pitting the digital CD against the beloved analog vinyl record. The degradation of CD quality into something even more limited is simply proof to many fervent music listeners that Armageddon is indeed at hand.

But several factors are making the debate over sound quality and bitrates more relevant now. Digital storage is cheaper than ever, download speeds are increasingly fast and digital music files have taken the place of CDs in many home theaters and cars. Many people are specifically asking for higher-quality downloads, and Apple and other online retailers are eager to deliver them — for a higher price, of course. (The price of complete albums from iTunes in the higher-quality format will remain the same.)

Barney Wragg, who oversees EMI’s global digital music efforts, said there had been a shift in the music marketplace. “What was an entirely PC, MP3-player experience has changed; now people are wiring music via iPods into their stereos in their home and their car,” he said. “That’s what is driving the demand for increased fidelity. When I connect an iPod directly into the hi-fi in my car, I really notice the difference.”

Apart from bitrate, the sound quality of digital music is also affected by its format, which is determined by the software used to compress it, known as a codec. MP3 is one of the older techniques for compressing audio and is not widely used by online stores. Apple has chosen a newer format called Advanced Audio Coding (AAC), which plays on iPods and some other devices. Most other online stores use the similarly modern Windows Media Audio, or WMA, which does not play on iPods.

All three of these formats are “lossy,” meaning the encoding software surgically trims out audio information that is not easy to hear, because it is covered up by other sound or is situated at the highest and lowest ranges of human hearing. The 9ice's track “Gongo Aso” is 33.4 megabytes when stored in an uncompressed format; the lossy compression methods bring that down to 6.1 megabytes at 256 kbps, or 3.1 megabytes at 128 kbps, regardless of the codec used. (When turning your CDs into song files on your PC, you can choose the bitrate you want in the settings of iTunes or Windows Media Player.)


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