"High Resolution is the Future of Music" - Sony Exec.

Sony’s Kazuo Hirai: 'high resolution audio is the future of music'

The Sony chief executive has pinned the company’s ambitions on hi-res audio to revitalise the music industry

 ...excerpt from The Guardian

The debate over whether consumers can hear the difference in high resolution audio still rages, but Sony is hoping that better-than-CD sound quality will revitalize its music business.
On stage at the Europe’s largest electronics trade show, IFA in Berlin, charismatic Sony chief executive Kazuo Hirai declared that Hi-Res audio – music recorded in higher quality than CDs – as crucial to the success of its audio products.

“We see Hi-Res as a way to revitalise the music industry, creating a better engagement with the music and customers,” Hirai told a packed auditorium. “We see it as the future of our music business.”

Sony Music, the recording label arm of the company, posted rising profits in the last few quarters, with 32.5% rise in operating profit and 14.4% rise in revenues year-on-year in the third quarter of 2013, while the overall Sony business suffered losses.

‘MP3s just aren’t good enough anymore’

“I was listening to a famous Japanese artist in Hi-Res when I realised I could hear every breath and was much more engaged,” said Hirai. “I realised that a good enough listening experience as MP3 is, it wasn’t enough anymore.”

Despite the evangelising of those in the music industry and consumer electronics business, consumers remain unconvinced of the difference. That means encouraging them to buy into a new system is a tough sell, Sony mobile chief executive Kuni Suzuki told the Guardian.
“Experience is everything. Once you’ve experienced audio in higher quality you can’t go back,” he said. “But practice in the field is quite important for people to experience it and then tell their friends about the experience.”

Suzuki said that Sony is relying on the power of word of mouth to sell the idea of Hi-Res music to consumers, fitting the technology into its high-end Xperia Z3 smartphones and tablets, as well as hi-fis and portable music players.

Sony Music is also offering an expanding collection of albums from its artists in Hi-Res audio, with Pharrell Williams, Miley Cyrus, Kasabian among those recently released, bring the total number of tracks available in Hi-Res to over 300,000.

A standards mess

Hi-Res music comes in many different formats and qualities, however, suffering from a lack of industry standardisation.

Linn records, for instance, offers tracks in the lossless audio format FLAC, while others offer still compressed music in AAC or the large DSD files, which are used in professional recording of music the studio.

“What we’re trying to do with our Hi-Res audio branding is to simplify it for the consumer,” Eric Kingdon, Sony’s senior European technical manager explained to the Guardian. “The idea is that whatever you throw at it it’ll play and meaning you don’t have to worry about file formats.”

Sony is not the only one forging ahead with Hi-Res audio. Neil Young’s Pono player has spurred a renewed interest in high resolution audio, while Linn records and others like it have been offering “studio master” recordings – the music the artist originally recorded in the studio – for around £18 an album.

The debate still rages as to whether high resolution music is actually audibly better, but the storage and bandwidth limitations that held it back in the past have eroded as smartphones, internet connections and technology has improved.
Either way, “the MP3 will survive for a long while yet for sheer convenience, if nothing else” admitted Kingdon.