High-Resolution Audio: The Song Does Not Remain the Same

Have you heard? Audio’s back.

Audio never went away, of course, but during a decade dominated by bigger, better TVs, audio was, if not forgotten, somewhat taken for granted.

Of course, there is some irony there. Music was arguably never more prevalent as a cultural force than it was during the early 2000s. Digital files made music ubiquitous, and therein lies the rub: If music was more readily available—more content, cheaper to acquire—few would deny the quality of the files was inferior to what we loved during the good old days of analog. The moral of the story, circa 2007, seemed to be that free trumps fidelity.

Enter Beats headphones, and the new era of luxury headphones that could command price points previously unimaginable.

In addition to transfiguring an audio accessory typically given away on airplanes, the headphones revolution focused attention, finally, back on how audio sounded. The moral of this still-evolving story, circa 2015: People are willing to pay for an enhanced listening experience.

Now, enter high-resolution audio. CEA’s recent High-Resolution Audio Study offers irrefutable evidence that consumers have an appetite for this latest technology trend. According to the study, 37 percent of overall consumers are interested in listening to high-resolution audio. This represents a total market of 91 million U.S. adult consumers and speaks to a demographic that takes audio very seriously.