I fancy myself a bit of an audiophile.  I’m not crazy with it, but I like my music to sound really clean and full.  To help you judge my level of audio analness (not a word), I’ve never owned a car where I didn’t strip the speakers, amp, and head unit out of.  Hearing your favorite music as loud and vibrantly as possible is a bigger deal to me than most.  The digital revolution has been amazing for pretty much every facet of life, but in the audio world, from a quality standpoint, we may have taken two step forwards and three back.  It is very common for me to hear conversations with other audiophiles and recording professionals say that the most vibrant sound they’ve ever listened to came off a turntable with a new needle.

The dumbing down of our audio quality is the result of compression – the digital sampling of a song and creating a small binary unit to represent what was once harmonic analog sound.  The desire to fit more and more music on people’s ipods and radio station servers has led to the shrinking of file sizes and a limiting of the full instruments capabilities. Internet radio stations like Pandora are great, but they are still heavily compressed to conserve bandwidth, and for similar reasons satellite radio has lowered their sampling rates to fit more stations on their own bandwidth.   The sampling rate and quality of the codec used in the compression can make a big difference.  There are many audio file types out there, and you may or may not have even heard of some.

The most common audio file formats and their traits.

.WAV/.AIFF

The wav file is considered the cream of the crop.  It and it’s Mac equivalent, the Aiff, are uncompressed digital copies of the original. You get CD quality audio, but at a price.  The file size is the largest of any of the file types discussed.  When using an NLE like Avid or FCP the wav/aiff is the best to work with.  I usually convert any Mp3 audio I’m using for a project to aiff.  This does not increase the quality, but you don’t have to render the audio and hear that ridiculous beeping sound on playback.

.MP3

Everyone already knows a lot about mp3’s so I won’t go into detail.  An mp3 can be a small file.  Usually about 3-5 megs per song.  This is how it got so ubiquitous.  Not all mp3’s are equal.  When creating an mp3 you can adjust the bitrate quality.  At a very minimum I use an 192 kpbs bitrate on anything I listen to.  Sometimes this isn’t possible, as many mp3’s made a few years ago were made at 128 kpbs to save space.  As storage gets cheaper and cheaper, I have even added lossless 320kps mp3’s to my collection.  This is the least bit of compression you can use. If you’ve got the hard drive space, set 192kpbs as your low end quality standard for music tracks.

.AAC

On paper this compressed format is better than mp3, especially when compared at similar low bitrates.  However, Apple jumped on the bandwagon of AAC for iTunes in 2003, and coupled it with their Digital Rights Management (DRM) code and soured everyone to the format, because you couldn’t play that song on any other mp3 player on the market.  It had become synonymous with shackles and chains, and since Apple abandoned DRM on iTunes in 2007 it is slowly getting it’s reputation back.  All that said, you’ll probably never purposely create and AAC.

.FLAC

The new cool kid on the block for audiophiles.  It’s considered a lossless format, nearly identical to the original, but with little compression.  It’s like a wav but 20-50% smaller in size.  People have been using this format to archive CD’s.  You can recreate the CD perfectly if you were ever to lose the disc.  Torrent sites are full of flac albums, which is great cause you can download them in CD quality and decide whether to leave them in flac format to play on your PC or convert them to mp3’s for your iPod.   Some audio post production software like Adobe Audition will take a flac file. Although, you’ll probably just make an AIFF.

.Ogg

You won’t be using this odd format most likely, but you can find Vorbis files on free sound effects sites.  That’s because it’s a royalty free codec like flac.  It actually is a better compression than mp3, makes a smaller file, and has been around forever, but it’s like the BetaMax of audio and just never caught on.