Debates rage over whether hi-res music is a gimmick. Three Guardian writers put four music formats – and their ears – to the test Why are we still listening to over-compressed music through ...

First developed almost three decades ago, the MP3 format made large digital audio files relatively small and easy to pass across an internet that was largely accessed via a very slow (by today’s ...

Choosing the right audio format matters to every producer and mastering engineer. When you know precisely when to use WAV, MP3, or FLAC, your workflow becomes more efficient and your masters retain ...

Computers are digital devices, representing data as discrete numbers, while sound is analog, which can exist at any value. For a computer or any digital device to store sound, it must encode the audio ...

Through the looking glass: Nearly three decades after its US patent date, the MP3 is no longer the cutting edge of audio compression. Yet support for it remains ubiquitous in media players, browsers, ...

The best MP3 players (aka digital audio players or DAPs) sound great and let you listen to music offline without paying for a subscription. If you don’t want to use your phone to listen to music, you ...