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B&W Music Club
There has always been a debate between audiophiles regarding downloadable music. Part of the camp claims that downloaded music will never sound as good as music purchased on a CD. Regardless, you can't deny the convenience of buying music online. Famed loudspeaker manufacture Bowers & Wilkins hopes to change the quality of downloadable music with the launch of the B&W Music Club.
The B&W Music Club is a subscription based service which provides its members with an exclusive album every month in Apple Lossless Compression. The idea is simple, record the album in one of the most advanced recording studio around and distribute it in a lossless format so that you can hear the music as it was intended.
A yearly subscription will run you around $67 which is about $5.50 an album which isn't bad considering the quality you'll be getting. And while we lacked the reference equipment to appreciate the work that went into making the recording, just the thought of having a file that wasn't compressed made is sound better.
Comments
5
Subscribe to commentslegacydeviceJun 27th 2008 11:00AM
Yes, compression does terrible things to audio. Compressed audio REALLY needs to go away. However, the fact that Apple and Microsoft both have their own lossless codec is not a step in the right direction; there's not a damn thing wrong with FLAC. I have a Zune, and do use WMA Lossless for the majority of my music, but using that for the Zune, and using FLAC in Ableton Live is a pain in the ass.
Yes, I'm well aware of dbpoweramp... that's not the point.
BlackAleJun 27th 2008 10:10PM
what nonsense, ever heard of transparancy, most lossless codecs can achieve it.
BlackAleJun 27th 2008 10:12PM
duh, i mean most LOSSY codecs can achieve it.
FLAC is great and all that, but isn't better than an mp3 encoded for transparency in terms of sound quality.
SensaiJun 27th 2008 2:41PM
I've only recently become an audiophile, and the difference is crystal clear when you listen to music in some decent headphones or over speakers.
The problem is, it takes up too much god damn space. I know, I know: you can't fix that and it's worth it. But I have upwards of 12000 songs...all of that in FLAC would be a LOT more space consuming than .mp3 files at 320 kbps...
Which, if we're being honest, is what I'm aiming to get most of my music as. I don't feel cheap about having an .mp3 file, and at the same time, I don't feel cheap about not getting a higher quality format.
thnielsJul 5th 2008 5:49PM
MP3 transparency is an ideal compression sought for yet hardly objectively achievable. If you find a particular encoding to be transparent; then that is excellent. It doesn't, however, mean that it is transparent to everyone.