home stereo

You sign up with a music download service, get your 128-Kbps (or 192-Kbps, if you're lucky) music files, and put those files onto your portable audio player. Everything sounds fine when you're listening through your low-end earbuds on the subway, but when you try to play those files through your high-end home stereo or headphones, you will notice that their sound quality is pretty poor because of all that compression. Enter MusicGiants: Finally, a company is offering a music download service that uses a lossless compression format, Windows Media Audio (WMA) Lossless, which provides true CD-quality audio in about half the file size. For comparison, most commercially available MP3 and WMA files are encoded at from 64 Kbps to 192 Kbps; the WMA Lossless codec outputs files that are generally between 380 Kbps and 1,100 Kbps. The company believes that the high fidelity of the lossless files will entice artists who have previously shunned the digital download scene (Led Zeppelin, for example) to make their music available.

by Michael Kobrin