AV Specialty Dealers Jazzed by CEA-Backed Initiative to Promote High-Res Audio

Specialty audio dealers, whose performance audio roots were eroded by MP3 downloads and portable music players, are applauding Sony and CEA’s newly announced efforts to promote high-resolution audio. “I love the initiative,” David Wexler, owner of The Little Guys, Mokena, Ill., told Consumer Electronics Daily. “We need to make people more aware of making audio sound good again."

Wexler applauded the look of the new gear that was styled to appeal to younger people. “Part of the concept is to get people out of headphones and earbuds and into high fidelity,” he said, though Sony’s new audio announcements this week also included high-performance headphones. Wexler doesn’t see Sony’s new lineup supplanting audiophile components for the “tweak” two-channel crowd. Instead, he sees it as a new category addressing the needs of listeners who download and stream music in bedrooms, offices and small apartments. “It’s going to bring more fidelity to the masses,” Wexler said. Over the last 12 years or so, the music business has been largely about convenience and access at the expense of sound reproduction, he said. “People were not made aware of how good music can sound, even with MP3s,” he said.

Sony launched this week the HAP-Z1ES HDD music player ($1,999) with a one-terabyte hard disc drive, using the company’s DSD re-mastering engine that upconverts music files to double-DSD, or a 5.6-MHz sampling rate. Sony ES series additions include an analog FIR (finite impulse response) filter, low-phase noise liquid crystal oscillator and large-capacity twin transformers. The HAP-S1 Hi-Res Music Player ($999) integrates a two-channel AB amplifier and Sony’s Digital Sound Enhancement Engine (DSEE), which uses noise-shaping technology that’s said to deliver natural sound with a spatial feel. DSEE restores high-frequency sound and the “tail shape” of the waveform that’s lost through compression, Sony said. Both products can automatically sync with music files stored on a Mac or PC using Sony’s HAP music transfer software and can be controlled by Android and iOS apps on smartphones and tablets. In addition, Sony will launch the UDA-1 DAC amplifier ($799) for use with a PC or Mac.

"There’s a lot of confusion out there,” said Neal Manowitz, director of Sony Electronics’ Home Audio group, on Sony’s decision to bring out the high-res products now. By introducing products that can play a laundry list of file formats and incorporate digital-to-analog converters, “we've brought it all together and made it simple,” Manowitz said. The new audio line is “playing back virtually any audio format automatically,” he said. On whether the products will be upgradeable as formats are updated or new ones come out, Manowitz said that while the products are network-enabled, the company doesn’t have an announcement around next-generation products. He said Sony is looking to broaden the line to include more affordable price points.

Sony’s move is a good first step, said Steve Weiner, senior vice president at ListenUp in Denver. “We've been fans of high-res audio for a long time, and it’s awesome that we have a large, powerful organization supporting it” versus a “hobbyist thing for the tweak crowd,” Weiner said. ListenUp could do a better job of selling high-res audio “if it was a thousand times easier, and hopefully Sony is making it easier,” he said. At the same time, Weiner said, issues still need to be addressed including how content gets from one point to another “because the file sizes are quite large.”

Having a well-established brand such as Sony put its face on high-resolution audio lends credibility to the segment that hasn’t existed in the digital download world, Weiner said. Customers ask, “Who is this company I'm sending my money to?” he said. Most customers aren’t aware of smaller high-res labels such as HDtracks, Trax Records, Chesky Records, Blue Coast Records and Acoustic Sounds, Weiner said. Now that CEA and companies like Sony are raising awareness “it’s going to make this a lot more interesting to a much broader market place,” he said.

Dealers see a major opportunity from the initiative if the high-res audio awareness builds. Weiner said most people from 13-25 today “have on their person at any given time” a library of 100-5,000 songs. The interesting questions is how many will be interested in boosting the quality of their sound, he said. ListenUp believes there’s 5 to 25 percent of consumers who would have an interest in high-quality music reproduction “if they knew it existed, where it was available and what it costs.” Reaching that number of people has always been the challenge of the specialty AV retailer, he said. “We need companies like Sony, Lenbrook, Samsung and Apple to start telling people this is available, it’s accessible and it’s better,” he said.

Brian Hudkins, owner of Gramophone, Timonium, Md., praised the awareness campaign for “trying to bring high-res audio into the 21st century.” He recalled a consortium backed by CEA in the early 1980s to create awareness for CDs and said he’s excited by a similar initiative. Acknowledging “we're in a world of downloaded music,” Hudkins said customers have focused on quantity of songs and portability versus quality. A typical MP3 is less than one-tenth the resolution of a CD track, “much less what it could be on a full high-res music file,” he said. “We're in a world of high-speed Internet, storage is a commodity, so we no longer need to have these tiny music files,” he said. The high-res initiative is “a good way for the CE industry to reclaim music from the IT industry."

According to CEA President Gary Shapiro, “The time is right” for the industry to “explore new avenues” to help promote audio technology. CEA research shows four in 10 consumers with a “moderate interest” in audio are willing to pay more for high-quality audio devices, and 90 percent said sound quality is the most important aspect of the audio experience. CEA said music labels are expanding their online high-resolution audio (HRA) catalogs with “tens of thousands of HRA albums already available for download across every music genre.” Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group are part of the launch initiative in addition to the smaller labels. Sony is including 20 high-res tracks on its hard-disk-based music players.