A Week Without mp3. Now in HD Sound. And available on iTunes.

I can't help noticing, but we appear to be in the middle of a concerted effort to rebrand the downloaded mp3 facsimiles you buy from legal sites as "digital music". Indeed Apple have been advertising several recent album releases on TV with the catch line (I'm paraphrasing) "start your digital collection with...". Now far be it for me to rain on this particular parade, but this is utter bollox. How precisely are these downloads any more "digital" than a CD and doesn't the simple act of owning a CD mean you already have a "digital music collection?" 

Of course not that this will stop them from making the claim. Especially now, when you can, for the first time, download (sorry "add to your digital collection") the complete Beatles back catalogue from iTunes. Not that you would, of course, as there are a couple of problems with these downloads. They will sound worse than the original 50 year old vinyl versions and they are, quite incredibly, more expensive than the equivalent, better sounding, CD versions. Perhaps the two companies, whose "historic" agreement made this possible, and who so famously reference a pomaceous fruit, picked the wrong brand name. Given their continued reliance on flogging old rope, it would have been more accurate to name their respective organisations "Hemp."  
  
Of course this "digital music" marketing-ese which Apple use, isn't an isolated example. There are many others just as culpable. Take the BBC. Recently they announced the introduction of "HD Sound" versions of their streamed radio channels. So does this service offer 24 bit/96khz streams, comparable to SACD or DVDA? Of course it doesn't. It is just a slightly higher quality version of the lamentable thing they offer at the moment. No harm in that I suppose. Well, yes and no. I can't dispute that it sounds better, but "HD?". If you read the technical gobbledegook they've posted to justify the addition of the prefix "HD", you'll realise the patent misdirection they are engaged in. No matter how they try to cache it, the 320kbps standard they've picked is patently worse than the "real" HD formats of SACD or DVDA. By a considerable margin.  This so called HD sound is not, by the commonly accepted definition, "HD".  More damning? It's actually worse than that unloved throw back - good old CD. And here's the thing. I'd always suspected, sooner or later, someone would call an mp3 based audio format, offering sound quality worse than that of CD, "HD". The only surprise? The culprit is the BBC. Why the "surprise? My money was on Apple. 


If ever there was an example of why I need a sub-editor it's the tortuous language I've used in this post. Honestly? The more I think about what I've written, the worse it gets, especially when I try and "fix it". I reach the point when the sentences stop making any sense. Or rather when the sentences start making even less sense. Damn my clumsy sentence construction....*

*Still at it.