It was only couple of weeks ago that I bought my first digital download, persuaded at last by a website that offered high-resolution remasters. My first purchase was a 96kHz, 24-bit version of an old familiar: Metallica’s Black Album. You might remember it as the band’s first departure from thrash metal, the radio-friendly album that had headbangers shaking their crania in disapproval as they pretended the world had come to an end. But in spite of what my long-haired, torn-bejeaned 17-year-old self said back then, The Black Album is a great record. Time, after all, is the cruellest critic, and the music sounds good even today.

Not long after, on May 13th, the news came out that for the first time digital music sales were greater than those of CDs and records. The convenience of dematerialised digital is a big factor, however the other great benefit over CD is that you’re not locked to a resolution.

But what does “better than CD quality” mean? Well, digital music is stored as a series of “snapshots” of the original sound, and for CD quality, you need 44,100 of these per second, a sampling rate of 44.1kHz. So my 96kHz download has more than double the number of snapshots per second, and you can get up to 192kHz.

More importantly, the values in each snapshot are taken from a palette of numbers called the bit depth. CD audio is 16-bit, which means that when the digitiser is assigning values to the original music, it has about 65,000 gradations to choose from. Most high-res audio is 24-bits, which offers more than 16 million gradations. Analogue music, of course, has a theoretical infinite number.

Sounded richer

The result was that the Black Album sounded fuller and richer than the CD version, and there was a greater sense of immediacy, and therefore emotional connection with the music. In fact, the sound had a pleasing, natural quality that so far I’ve heard only from my turntable and a few well-recorded CDs.

That natural quality is elusive, even in hi-fi world. I recently attended a high-end audio show where I heard systems so expensive that numbers lost meaning. I saw eight-foot-high speakers hooked to amplifiers the size of car boots using cables thicker than my arm. I listened to turntables where the cartridges alone cost $15,000 (Dh55,050). And yet, over the day, I heard astonishingly little music. Sure the noises were impressive—huge distortion-free soundscapes in which you could point to exactly where a certain cymbal was being hit. But when I did hear music, it was in rooms with far more modest looking systems. The speakers looked like wooden ones from the 70s, the amplifiers were regular boxes, and the sound coming out wasn’t big, yet was sweet and musical.

Almost as a reminder about what these systems were aspiring to, the show included a live jazz band by the pool, where of course the sound was bigger and more musical than anything inside. People are quick to say that after a while, digital resolution stops mattering — even at CD quality we’re talking about 44,100 things happening in <ital>one second</ital>. But the live band reminded me how this thinking sells our ears seriously short. It was easy to hear how even the $200,000 system that looked like a small city didn’t even approach the limits of perception. Try it the next time you’re listening to non- or lightly amplified live music. Close your eyes and pretend the sound’s coming from a music system, and be startled at just how wonderful our ears are, and what a long way electronics still have to go.

Gautam Raja is a journalist based in the US.