Internet music retailers offer millions of tunes, in every genre from opera to hip-hop to Palestinian folk songs. But it's still hard to find online music that sounds good on a $10,000 stereo system.
Online music sellers like Apple Inc. and Amazon.com use digital compression technologies to shrink the sizes of music files, making them easier to store and download. But compression also hollows out the music, eliminating many of the sonic subtleties cherished by hardcore audiophiles. That's why many finicky music lovers won't sully their ears with today's downloadable tunes and are clamoring for something better.
"Personally, I don't even bother considering to download or buy anything from iTunes, Amazon, et cetera," said Ed Sawyer, a 38-year-old Web applications developer in Dover, N.H. He's willing to reconsider, but only if download sites offer more music in formats that don't diminish the sound quality. "High fidelity of downloads is crucial in my world," he said.
A handful of online music dealers, including Magnatune, MusicGiants Inc., and AIX Media Group Inc., are responding with audio downloads that match, and in some cases exceed, the quality of standard CDs.
"If you're going to ask people to move from CDs to downloads, I think you have to have something that's just as compelling," said Magnatune's founder, John Buckman.
Standard CD audio is stored in a digital format called WAV. But a typical album takes up between 600 and 700 megabytes of space in WAV format. Early in the decade, when music downloading first caught on, most people still had relatively small hard drives and slow dial-up Internet connections, making it tedious and costly to download music.
Along came compression methods like MP3 and AAC. These can squeeze music files to about one-tenth their original size, but at a price. The system identifies sound frequencies that most people barely notice, and deletes them. The results are acceptable when heard through cheap speakers or headphones. But many people find that MP3 or AAC files don't sound as rich and complex as WAV audio. So serious audiophiles keep buying CDs.
But sales of CDs and other hard-copy music formats plunged by almost 10 percent last year, while sales of music downloads grew by 50 percent, according to Nielsen SoundScan. As a result, "brick-and-mortar record retail stores are a dying breed," said John Atkinson, editor of Stereophile, a magazine for audio buffs.
Purists need a new way to buy high-quality music, and recording companies need a new way to sell their wares. "You're starting to see a lot of experimentation," Atkinson said, "just to see what will actually stick with the buying public."
Many of these experiments are happening online.
Magnatune, for example, is an independent label that offers classical, rock, and folk albums for as little as $5 each. Customers can download each album multiple times, and in multiple formats. MP3 and AAC are available, but buyers can also get uncompressed WAV files. These take longer to download, but this doesn't matter so much when most customers have high-speed connections and huge hard drives. Buckman said most Magnatune customers download albums in WAV for playback on a home stereo and in MP3 for use on a portable player.
MusicGiants, of Incline Village, Nev., is more of a music distributor. It licenses the rights to offer digital downloads from major labels like EMI Group. A growing number of the albums in its catalog are offered in a "lossless" version of Microsoft Corp.'s Windows Media Audio format, or WMA. Standard WMA works like MP3; it discards some of the audio data, thus reducing the quality of the music. But lossless WMA produces a file that matches a CD's original fidelity. "There's no sonic quality difference from playing a WAV file or playing a Windows Media Audio file," said MusicGiants' chief executive, Scott Bahneman.
AIX, of Los Angeles, is even more passionate about sound quality. Its iTrax.com site offers about 35 rock, jazz, and classical albums in 18 formats, ranging from MP3 to six-channel surround-sound versions that far exceed the quality of a standard CD.
"One tune can be 600 megabytes," said AIX founder Mark Waldrep. That's about the size of an entire CD recorded in the WAV standard. A full album at iTrax can cost about $22, compared to the standard iTunes cost of $9.99, and can take hours to download.
"We do exist on the lunatic fringe," Waldrep said. "There aren't a lot of people out there making Ferraris, but there is a big profit margin on Ferraris."
Mainstream music download sites have shied away from the audiophile market so far. A spokesman said Amazon.com has no plans to offer music in formats other than MP3. Apple spokesman Jason Roth pointed to that company's iTunes Plus program. For $1.29 per song - compared to the standard iTunes price of 99 cents - iTunes Plus offers many tunes in a less-compressed, better-sounding version of AAC. Roth would not comment on persistent rumors that Apple may offer uncompressed music downloads.
It's a move that audio buff Ed Sawyer would welcome.
"When Apple offers lossless downloads from the iTunes store, I'd consider shopping there," he said. "I can't imagine wasting time, energy, or money on anything compressed."
Hiawatha Bray can be reached at bray@globe.com.
(Correction: Because of a reporting error, a story in yesterday's Business & Innovation section about music downloads gave wrong pricing on Apple Inc.'s iTunes Plus downloads. The company now charges 99 cents per download.)
