Apple was working on higher quality music and hardware, says rocker
According to rocker Neil Young, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs was working on a project to bring higher-quality music to the masses. In an interview during the D: Dive Into Media conference on Tuesday, Young said he was collaborating with Jobs on the project before his death, though not much progress has been made since then.
Young is particularly sensitive about the fact that most music today comes in the form of highly compressed AAC or MP3 formats. "My goal is to try and rescue the art form that I've been practicing for the past 50 years," Young said. "We live in the digital age, and unfortunately it's degrading our music, not improving."
To address the problem, Young said, he and Jobs were working on updated hardware to store and play back "high-quality audio." The quality that Young referred to seems to be 24-bit 96kHz audio—the same quality used to record and master most albums these days. As he noted, even the standard 16-bit 44.1kHz audio used for CDs only contains about 15 percent of the information captured in master recordings. (Our own calculations suggest it's more like 30 percent, but the point is still valid).
Upgrading to 24-bit audio is something that others in the record industry have tried to talk Apple into doing before . In fact, in early 2011, Universal Music Group's Jimmy Iovine said that UMG had also been working with Apple to enable iTunes to use 24-bit audio.
"What we're trying to do here is fix the degradation of music that the digital revolution has caused," Iovine said during an HP media event. "We're working with [Apple] and other digital services—download services—to change to 24-bit. And some of their electronic devices are going to be changed as well. So we have a long road ahead of us."
The road may indeed be long. Along with audio hardware upgrades to handle the higher resolution files, storage will also be an issue. Today's iPhones and iPods can store thousands of tracks compressed in a 256kbps, 16-bit 44.1kHz AAC format. 24-bit 96kHz files, even using lossless compression, would require far more than the 64GB maximum storage available from the top-end iPhone 4S.
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The quality that Young referred to seems to be 24-bit 96kHz audio—the same quality used to record and master most albums these days. As he noted, even the standard 16-bit 44.1kHz audio used for CDs only contains about 15 percent of the information
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