What is Pure Audio

High Resolution Surround Sound

Undoubtedly in general, the audition through the speakers and especially through the headphones at home, in the car, on the street or even in the club, is stereophonic. The appearance of stereo recordings was, with years before, as the appearance of color television. The same happened with Audio CD. You probably remember the badly recorded audio compact cassettes or even the original ones played on a poor quality cassette player. Then the new dimensions of sound and music have been rediscovered.

The vinyl, despite its relative exceptional quality, remains a quite retro music environment. Recordings made on professional studio reel tape recorders, which are still used today to remix some famous albums along with the quadrophonic experiments of the ’70s, have been an attempt to bring the space sensation into the musical sphere. But the true evolution has been through 5.1 surround sound technologies proposed by Dolby Digital and DTS Surround, and lately through lossless Dolby TrueHD updated with Atmos extension, DTS-HD Master Audio with DTS:X and three layers immersive spatial field of Auro-3D.

It should also be mentioned that the new SONY’s 360 Reality Audio system generally speaking, is not a true surround sound format (not even Hi-Res), although it is technologically similar to Dolby Atmos. It was developed primarily for listening through headphones on smart phones and is basically a virtual surround sound system, like Dobly Headphones or Apple Spatial Audio. So it’s not PURE AUDIO! But read more about What is not Pure Audio a bit further down the page.

You don’t need golden ears to hear the difference, you just need an open mind. When the Audio CD standard was established in 1982, we thought that we’d cracked it, but science and technology have moved on. Back then, we were watching VHS, now the 8K even 12K video is on the horizon! We knew that CD quality would capture the frequency range of human hearing, but we were oblivious to our hearings true potential. Recent studies have revealed our sensitivity to timing information in audio, this makes sense when you think of how we can pinpoint an audio source with our eyes closed.

For sure the surround sound combined with the lossless high-resolution audition introduces you into a world of perfection, it reveals a realistic acoustic experience that will change your way of perceiving music. If you have a well-equipped high quality Home Theater system, acoustically calibrated, this is your chance to be part of the future of music and to hear the sound of the technological revolution, to listen my music as I have imagined, to close your eyes and leave you totally immersed into the PURE AUDIO.

What is not Pure Audio

Studio Master Quality Sound

The music industry is struggling to define High-Resolution Audio or "HRA". In doing so, most have focused on the delivery formats - analog vs. digital, 24bits vs. 16bits, PCM vs. DSD, uncompressed vs. compressed. But, High-Resolution Audio is much more than the delivery format. Delivery formats may limit resolution, but they do not define the resolution delivered to your ears. To understand this, it may be easier to define what is NOT High-Resolution Audio.

A 24bit recording played through the headphones, native 352.8kHz DXD played through laptop speakers and high-quality SACD playing through a typical car stereo are not HRA. These examples are limited by the quality of the playback system. It is nearly impossible to build a low-power portable device that achieves much more than 16bit performance. 24bit audio provides little value when played through low-power, low-voltage portable devices. Likewise, the bandwidth provided by a 192kHz sample rate is of no use when played through the speakers on a laptop computer. The 44.1kHz CD sample rate is more than sufficient when the sound will be delivered by the laptop speakers or headphones.

A 768kHz up-sampled version of CD, a "restored" version of an MP3 and hi-res digital copy of vinyl or an analog reel tape are not HRA. These examples are limited by the quality of the source. A 768kHz up-sampled conversion of a CD will never be better than the original CD. MP3 processing it cannot recover the details that were lost when compression was applied. HRA is all about details. Vinyl records are not hi-res recordings having very specific performance limitations. They contain noise levels that are much higher than a CD, limited stereo separation, and impose constraints of the audio spectrum. Studio analog tape may exceed the frequency response of the CD, but without professional dynamic processing, it cannot achieve the noise performance of the 16bit PCM encoding used on the CD.

Today we have 192kHz and 96kHz 24bit digital releases of classics and we rediscovered our favorite tunes when we purchased albums and upgraded our stereo systems. With the improved audition components, we discovered details that we had never heard while listening to the same song hundreds of times on a cheap radio. These digital releases may or may not fully meet the definition of High-Resolution Audio, but they capture more detail than the original analog releases.