When a streaming app puts a "Hi-Res" badge on an album, I tap it first without thinking. I used to go further than that. On FLAC download sites I would deliberately pick the files labeled 24bit/192kHz, because they were about six times the size of a CD-quality rip, and bigger obviously meant better. Then I read an article by Monty Montgomery, the audio engineer behind Xiph.Org, and realized I had been paying a storage tax for nothing. His conclusion is blunt: for distribution, 24/192 gets you nothing over CD quality (16bit/44.1kHz). The files are just six times heavier.
Why 44.1kHz is enough
The argument rests on the Nyquist theorem, the same math behind every ADC you've ever touched. Sample a signal at twice its highest frequency and you can reconstruct it perfectly. Human hearing tops out around 20kHz, so 44.1kHz sampling captures the entire audible band. Sampling at 192kHz doesn't make the audible part any sharper. All it adds is content above 20kHz, ultrasound that no one can hear. Montgomery's comparison: the infrared LED in an Apple remote sits about 20% past the edge of visible light, while 192kHz audio reaches 400% of the audible limit. Worse, that ultrasonic content doesn't stay out of the way. Speakers and amps aren't perfectly linear, so ultrasonics intermodulate and spray distortion products back down into the audible band. You store sound nobody can hear, and it can smear the sound everyone can.
Bit depth is the same story. 16-bit PCM gives you 96dB of dynamic range on paper, and with proper dithering that stretches to about 120dB in practice. That's roughly the gap between a mosquito in the same room and a jackhammer a foot away. Nothing you play at home spans it. 24-bit does have a real job: in recording and mixing it's headroom, soaking up the noise that accumulates over thousands of processing passes. That headroom matters in the studio. For the file that ships to listeners, 16 bits is already more than enough.
Even Neil Young couldn't beat the blind test
This isn't only theory. The Boston Audio Society ran controlled listening tests with professional gear in a soundproofed studio, and across 554 trials listeners picked correctly 49.8% of the time. A coin flip. One man bet a company on the opposite result: Neil Young raised over $6 million on Kickstarter in 2014 for Pono, a dedicated 24bit/192kHz player. Journalist David Pogue then ran a blind test with 15 people aged 17 to 55, comparing Pono's FLAC files against AAC-compressed tracks on an iPhone. More listeners preferred the iPhone. Pono shut down in 2017. Young blamed the record labels, but the simpler explanation is that there was never an audible difference to sell.
The retail side of hi-res can be even shakier. A Korean newspaper had 90 tracks sold as 24bit/96kHz on three Korean music stores put through spectrum analysis, and only two actually met the labeled spec (article in Korean). The rest were upsampled from lower-resolution masters, and the reporting pointed at distributors doing the upsampling themselves after receiving plain MP3s and WAVs from the labels. If customers can't hear the difference anyway, nobody in the supply chain has much incentive to make the number real.
The pricing pages caught up
The market has quietly conceded the point. Apple Music made lossless and hi-res free for subscribers in 2021, and Amazon folded its $5-extra HD tier into the base plan the same year. Tidal, which built its brand on selling hi-res as a premium tier, merged everything into a single $10.99 plan in April 2024. And when Spotify finally shipped lossless in September 2025, after teasing a paid "HiFi" tier for years, it capped the format at 24-bit/44.1kHz FLAC and bundled it into regular Premium. Not 192kHz. The pricing pages worked out what the blind tests already showed: hi-res is not something people will pay extra for.
So I stopped paying for big numbers. The same money goes a lot further on better headphones or speakers, or on a well-mastered release. These days I check which mastering a version uses and how hard it's been compressed before I ever look at the sample rate.
Top comments (0)