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To paraphrase Chevy Chase, it’s all marketing these days. Marketing departments are well known for their propensity to stretch, revise or reinvent phraseology to conform to, or create their vision in the minds of the buying public. So it is with Apple and a few other companies. Apple is obviously rather well known for the ubiquitous, little box of digital content known as the iPOD. What you may not be aware of, unless you love to follow such things, is the bit of deception foisted on consumers under the guise of “high resolution”.

First of all, before the roasting, Kudos to Apple for offering consumers a choice in quality levels in the first place, and allowing DRM free music downloads. DRM free downloads, with greater device compatibility, from iTunes has been a quest of many consumers for a long time.

The problem lies with Apple’s claim their new AAC music downloads at a 256k bit rate have, as their website proclaims, “audio quality indistinguishable from the original recording”. Now that may be true whilst one is listening on the pint sized ear buds typically used with an iPOD, but I’m sure many in the audio/video and recording industries would argue is not the case on a high quality home audio system. Apple’s claim is misleading in the extreme. For those of you unversed in such matters, standard CDs (using what’s known as the “Red Book” standard) have a bit rate of 1,411.2 kbps. No matter how good the compression algorithm is, and AAC is a good one, something’s missing from the picture at 256k.

Apple may be forgiven for such transgressions if their statements contained a grain of truth, but there actually are high resolution audio formats on the market, and they are not just high resolution, but multi-channel as well. In this vein, Sony and Philips gave us the Super Audio CD (SACD), and it really sounded fantastic. There is also the DVD-Audio format, a competitor to SACD (won’t the A/V industry ever learn consumers want a single format they can support?) that basically uses the entire data storage capability of a DVD to store audio only, instead of audio and video.

More recently, for motion picture soundtracks, and presumably music videos, video sound stalwarts Dolby Labs and DTS have brought us Dolby Digital HD, Dolby Digital Plus, and DTS-HD. These are truly high resolution digital audio formats. Amazingly, these true high resolution audio formats don’t use a 256k bit rate!! Maybe they can learn something from Apple. Obviously the scientists and engineers in the labs in Cupertino must be much more on the ball than those dullards over at Sony, Philips, Dolby and DTS, or maybe it’s just the marketing (consumer confusion) department.

Consumers are confused enough by the audio /video industry. Remember VHS/Beta? Not to be outdone, this generation of a/v marketers has delivered HD-DVD / Blu-Ray Disc. Few remember it, but we nearly traveled don the same path with standard DVD, until an 11^th hour compromise by Sony and Toshiba (Hey! Those are the same two companies involved in the whole HD-DVD / BRD thing) put the whole thing to bed, and let us all enjoy DVD.

Regarding Apple leading consumers down the “High Resolution” path to low resolution audio, it’s been seen before.  Remember FOX’s “Fox High Resolution” video broadcasts a few years ago? When the other networks were broadcasting in HDTV, Fox decided they would put off the investment in transitioning to real HDTV a few years by giving consumers “High Resolution” TV (HRTV??).That stuff was widescreen TV that ran at higher than regular TV, but lower than HDTV resolution, hence the “high resolution” moniker. Consumers were so confused that few probably even knew what they were getting, and that’s probably just as the FOX execs wanted it. Maybe the same guys are in the marketing departments at FOX and Apple.