HIGH-RES AUDIO EXPLAINED
Why it’s not about bat frequencies
The wrong discussion
“People only hear up to 20 kHz. Hi-Res is marketing. No one can hear that.”
Audiophiles have been having this discussion for years. It misses the point.
It’s not about whether you can hear 25 kHz as a beep. You can’t – unless you’re a bat. It’s about something else: the quality of the sound wave.
What Hi-Res really means
Analog audio is a continuous wave – infinitely many values, fluid transitions. Digital audio is an approximation: we measure the wave at regular intervals and store these measuring points.
CD quality: 44,100 measuring points per second. Hi-Res (192 kHz): 192,000 measuring points per second.
More measuring points don’t mean “more frequencies for bats”. They mean: a more accurate representation of the original. The difference lies in the precision – not in the pitch.
What I hear after 30 years in the studio
I’ve spent thousands of hours mixing and mastering. Here’s what makes Hi-Res and analog different – and what you’ll hear too if you know what to listen for:
Reverb tails
When a sound fades away in a room, you hear the reverberation – the “reverb tail”. With compressed audio, these fine decays are cut off or blurred. With Hi-Res and analog, they breathe out. The room becomes audible. That’s one of the most obvious differences: close your eyes and you are in the recording room.
Soundstage and spatiality
Where is the bassist standing? How far away is the drum kit? With Hi-Res, the spatial arrangement becomes much clearer. Instruments have their place – they don’t swim in a flat mush. Audiophiles call this “soundstage”, and with good recordings in high resolution, it’s three-dimensional.
Transients and impulse fidelity
The strike of a piano key. The settling of a violin string. The attack of a snare. These moments are extremely short – milliseconds. The higher the sampling rate, the more precisely they are captured. The sound becomes “faster”, more direct, more alive.
The de-esser problem (for the nerds)
As a mixing engineer, you spend hours editing vocal tracks. You turn up the highs so that the voice sounds present – and then the S sounds hiss unpleasantly sharp. So you use a de-esser, a tool that dampens exactly these frequencies again.
With analog tape recordings? You wouldn’t get the idea. The S sounds simply sound like S sounds – natural, not hissy. Hi-Res comes close again. Digital artifacts disappear, the naturalness returns.
And what does science say?
This is where it gets interesting. A Japanese research group led by Tsutomu Oohashi investigated whether inaudible frequencies above 20 kHz still have an effect. The result: when music contained these high-frequency components, the subjects showed increased alpha wave activity in the brain – even though they could not consciously hear the frequencies.
The study is controversial. Other researchers could not prove any conscious difference in blind tests. But that’s exactly the point: we perceive more than we consciously hear. The body reacts to the complete sound wave – not just the ear.
Human vocals, drum cymbals, acoustic instruments – they all produce overtones above 20 kHz. You can see them in the frequency analyzer. And even if you don’t hear them as separate tones: they contribute to the overall sound. They give the sound its texture, its liveliness.
Source: Oohashi, T. et al. (2000): “Inaudible high-frequency sounds affect brain activity: hypersonic effect.” Journal of Neurophysiology, 83(6), 3548-3558.
Do you need Hi-Res?
If music is background noise: No.
If you’re listening on the side: No.
If you’re listening on the bus with Bluetooth earbuds: save yourself the bandwidth.
But when you sit down, close your eyes, and really listen – then it makes a difference.
Not with every track. But with acoustic recordings, jazz combos, classical chamber music, with voices and spaces:
You can hear it there.
Experience Hi-Res Audio – easier than you think
Forget what you’ve heard about expensive setups. You don’t need an external DAC, no studio monitors, no audiophile living room.
The fastest way to Hi-Res Audio:
- Take a wired headphone (yes, your old one will do)
- Plug it into your smartphone
- Open the Mother Earth Radio App
- Press Play
That’s it. Seriously.
Why this works: Your smartphone already has a DAC built in – a digital-to-analog converter that can process 192 kHz. Most people just don’t know it. The bottleneck is Bluetooth: it compresses the signal before it reaches your ears. With a cable, you bypass that completely.
No hustle. No voodoo. No 500-euro setup. Hi-Res Audio on your ear – for under 20 euros.
For audiophiles: The full setup
If you want to get the most out of it, you can of course upgrade:
External DAC: Devices like the FiiO E10K or Topping DX3 Pro+ deliver even cleaner conversion than the smartphone DAC.
Open headphones: Sennheiser HD 600, Beyerdynamic DT 990 or AKG K712 – open design for a more natural stage and better spatiality.
Quiet environment: Hi-Res unfolds best when you concentrate on listening. The fine details are lost in the subway.
But that’s optional, not mandatory. Getting started is easy – and you’ll hear the difference even without professional equipment.
Test now
Mother Earth Radio streams in up to 192 kHz / 24 Bit FLAC – lossless, digitized directly from vinyl. Four curated channels: Jazz, Classical, Eclectic, Instrumental.
Test for free in the browser. If you notice that there is more – more space, more breath, more music – then you know that Hi-Res makes sense for you.
→ Test now for free in the web player
Or get the app for the full experience:
