CNN is reporting that Apple is in talks with the music industry to offer improved quality 24-bit audio tracks, but an increase in sampling rate was not mentioned in the article.  The 24-bit format has been around since the late 1990s among professional musicians and it’s been readily available to consumers since the early 2000s, but it never garnered mainstream adoption.  Microsoft has had a 24-bit format with their Windows Media Audio (WMA) standard for many years but WMA never took any significant market share.  If this Apple goes through, it could be the first successful large-scale implementation of higher-than-CD quality music.

Note: Normal CD and iTunes audio uses 44.1 KHz sampling and 16-bit per sample while higher end devices support 24-bit at 96 KHz or better.  By comparison, telephony is largely stuck in ancient 8 KHz 8-bit format and even wide-band telephony marketed as “HD Voice” is limited to 16 KHz 14-bit audio.

The music industry had tried to produce a higher quality successor to the CD with the SACD standard and the DVD-Audio standard, but a format war, high cost and lack of mainstream enthusiasm prevented either standard from succeeding.  Not only did a better-than-CD standard fail to take hold in the market place, the market actually adopted a worse quality standard with lossy compression MP3 files.

The name “MP3″ was actually a condensed file extension for IBM-compatible computers.  The audio format was based on the third layer of the MPEG-1 video compression standard used by “Video CDs”, and was designed for compactness so that most of the space on a CD could be used for MPEG-1 video.  The compactness turned out to be a very desirable format for consumers because they could compress their CDs to a size that would fit in their hard drives in the late 1990s which were only big enough for a few CDs at the time, and more significantly it was a convenient format for downloading pirated compressed copies of CDs.  Other more advanced audio compression standards have been devised but none remain as universally compatible as MP3.

Apple’s dominance in the downloadable music business could means that music could finally improve in quality above CDs.  The 24-bit format will play on most decent computers (PC or Mac) or through an inexpensive sound card upgrade ($30), but it won’t play on most portable devices.  Apple could certainly change this in newer iPod, iPad, and iPhone products or even support existing devices through software updates and then sell a new premium audio format that will give it an advantage over competitors who have settled on the de facto MP3 standard.  As it has always been in the past, only Apple portable devices will be able to play Apple iTunes format unless consumers go through a complex and frequently lossy conversion process.

[Cross-posted at Digital Society]