Remember back in the 1980s when you purchased your first CD?
Whether it was Billy Idol or The Psychedelic Furs, imagine if you had gone home and placed the Sony-manufactured CD in your Panasonic CD player, only to find out that it didn’t work. Or, what if that CD from Virgin Records only had half the sound quality as a CD bought from Best Buy?

Believe it or not, this is exactly the current digital music environment in which we live. To navigate a digital world without standards, today’s audiophiles must gain some digital music knowledge to optimize their listening experience as they convert their CDs to digital music.

To understand where we’re headed with today’s digital music, it’s key to understand where we’ve been. All digital music formats are based on the principles discovered by German researchers at the prestigious Fraunhofer Institute. In 1987, the Institute began researching high quality digital audio compression.

They discovered that by understanding how humans hear music, a particular song could be stripped of excess sounds that were inaudible. The obvious first choice was to remove frequencies too high or too low for the human ear to perceive. However, the more interesting breakthrough was...

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