Hi-Res Audio Vs Lossless Audio

Which one is a scam?

Photo taken by the author. Cosair Virtuoso XT headset pictured. It’s one of many that promises hi-res audio support.

I’ll get right to the point: Hi-res audio is a ludicrous marketing trick used to con people out of their money, and lossless audio is good/fine/great/etc.

What do you do if you’re an audio manufacturer and you achieve too much sonic accuracy? When headphones and speakers and receivers get too good at reproducing audio, where do you go from there if you’re a big company that needs to keep making money and pleasing shareholders?

The audio industry decided they were going to go “Hi-Res” when they hit this inflection point. They rolled out new specs to target. They created a fancy certification sticker that products can apply for. And the marketing push began.

Sadly, it has worked. Hi-Res audio is still very much alive even though it’s an essentially useless thing. It’s a fake set of standards that don’t do anything to improve audio playback. It solely exists to separate listeners who yearn for better quality from more and more cash.

The core tenet of hi-res audio is its ability to reproduce frequencies beyond the upper limit of human hearing. Think about that for just a moment. Humans can hear tones between 20hz and 20khz…though the closer you get to either edge of that range, the lower the chances that you’ll perceive any meaningful sort of tone. 20Hz is a very low deep bass rumble, so low that it sounds like the depths themselves are coming to life. 20khz is an insanely high squeaky noise, like what you imagine a mouse might sound like but multiplied by a thousand.

Most music lives firmly in the middle of that range, say, between 50hz and 12khz.

The hi-res audio grift is simply this: our product reproduces double the amount of sound as others, going all the way up to 40khz. Remember, 20khz is the highest tone you could ever hope to hear, and the squeakiest sound you could possibly imagine. Why would you want to reproduce sounds many times higher than that which your ears can’t even perceive?

This graph always makes me cringe. If you doubt that it is scum — note how the right side is extended further than the left in spite of representing a similar amount of frequencies. Official marketing image, www.corsair.com

This above graph and others like it are constantly used to sell clueless people on the “promise” of…