Demonstrating HIFI

While I was recently thinking about how to show everyone the limitations of various delivery streams for HiFi (MP3, CD, HD audio). I took a single track recorded at 24bit/96kHz and down sampled it to CD 16bit/44.1kHz and to MP3 at 128kbps. Here are the audio spectra for these


24bit/96kHz


16bit/44.1kHz


MP3 128kbps

Since many musical instruments produce sounds way above 20kHz, even up to 50-80kHz for some, you can see why MP3s and even CDs can never reproduce the sound of the original instrument. 24bit/96kHz is a bare minimum required. Its nice to see that the original was a true HD recording, probably extending way up to 48kHz or so.

PS These spectra were made in Sound Studio software running on a MacBook.