You’ve just heard a breathtaking performance of the Liszt Sonata in B minor. Before the applause fades away you make your way out of the concert hall and rush to the record store to buy a CD of the piece. Half way down the aisle you slow down and remember there are no record stores in your community that carry classical music. Your instant gratification must be satisfied and a download would do the trick, but can you get high-end sound from a download? A lossless download, popularly called FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec), is the answer.
Ariama spoke about lossless downloads and the current state of recorded classical music with two audiophile experts. Chris Connaker is a computer audio consultant and creator of the Computer Audiophile website. Jason Victor Serinus is a nationally published writer about music and audiophile equipment whose work appears in Stereophile, Robb Report and on the Home Theater Hi Fi website.
How do listeners cope with the lack of CD shops?
CC: The benefit of lossless downloads become more apparent every day. They offer access to music on a level brick and mortar stores simply can’t afford. The remaining local record stores are using more and more floor space to sell pop culture trinkets instead of music in an effort to keep the doors open, so their selection is limited. In addition to endless selection, there’s nothing that competes with the instant delivery of lossless music. FedEx, UPS, or the US Postal Service can’t deliver an album quicker than a download.
What are the benefits of lossless downloads to a classical music listener?
JVS: There’s no question lossless is the way to go and its benefits to classical music are huge on every level. Instruments and voices sound more like they do in real life. You get dimensionality and that means air and space in the sound, so everything isn’t jammed together. Maybe most important is the quality of the mid-range, the warmth, the bottom of the sound, the overtones, and all the things that thrill us in music. They are all there and it makes for more realistic sound.
CC: Classical music frequently has the largest dynamic range and largest range of frequencies from the low bass canons of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture to the incredible highs of an Antonio Stradivari violin. Decreasing the size of an MP3 file to speed the download process removes a lot of musical information. There’s a size versus quality tradeoff that must be made when using them. Lossless downloads contain every single bit of the original recording and truly serve the artist and music very well.
JVS: Imagine Leontyne Price’s voice in a 128 kbps MP3. Her shimmering vibrato, husky low-range, and substantial middle are all compressed into one monochromatic bright sound. Even the best sounding 320kbps MP3 achieves its size by trashing huge amounts of information – there’s no way to retrieve it. Lossless downloads give you pretty much the full tonal envelope, delivering as much information as a CD will give you. As a matter of fact, a good computer playback system has the potential to sound even better than a CD because of its hard drive or solid-state drive.
CC: Also, unbeknownst to many classical music aficionados, lossless downloads offer unprecedented metadata capabilities. Metadata can be described as data about data. In this case it’s the extra data about each album or performance. Lossless downloads can easily contain information embedded into each track about the composer, conductor, orchestra, time period, recording venue and other details that increase one’s enjoyment of a recording. This is truly a great time to be a music lover. More music than ever before is now available as lossless downloads with more released daily. Some titles that have been out of print for decades are now available as lossless downloads. Online lossless music download sites such as Ariama can offer a virtually infinite number of albums for purchase and download. Instant access, endless libraries and the ability to navigate one’s music collection by one or several of many categories is changing the way music aficionados purchase and play music.
Want to hear what the experts are talking about? Check out our selection of favorite lossless titles. Remember, Ariama’s download manager is configured to automatically detect your default audio player and convert your lossless audio albums into files that will play in either iTunes or Windows Media Player – you don’t need a FLAC player. Can it possibly be easier? Great sound and instant gratification are yours.
by Craig Zeichner
