High Definition MP3 Lossless standard released
 

http://www.electronista.com/articles...aunches.mp3hd/

The new format supports bitrates between about 500Kbps to 900Kbps. Thomson announced on Thursday the release of a newly developed, backwards-compatible, lossless MP3HD format. Thomson had a hand in developing the digital MP3 audio format, but unlike MP3, the MP3HD format is lossless, meaning none of the audio information is lost.

who the fuck needs that?

Very cool

Not human ears that's for sure..

With a good sound system or a nice pair of headphones (sennheiser,grado) you can tell the difference. It's nice having quality. What's funny is lossless formats have been around for a long time (flac,ape). I guess most people are just lazy and don't care about quality. It's sort of like LCD monitors, most LCD monitors are TN panels. TN panels are shit, crap, garbage but that's what people buy up because it's cheaper than a quality panel that's a little more money.

Lossless formats aren't anything new. But it's going to take some stupid name like mp3 HD for it to take off.

Is it any better than existing loss-less formats?

Even if you're not an audiophile, here's why.
Say you encode all your songs at today's standard of choice, be it MP3, AAC, whatever.

6 months down the track, when the new audio player comes out, and you need to re-encode it, or you have new headphones / stereo and can hear the compression - if you don't have a lossless source, you're fucked. You transcode a lossy song, you get even more losses.

If you have the original, you can encode no issues.

Same thing as keeping the HQ photos you shoot, or the film you shoot, or whatever :)

Would like to see a comparison between WMA, FLAC, etc.. and the new standard.

I thought the whole reason for the original mp3 was to have a small file. If we want "lossless" why not just a .wav file? What's the point of a lossless mp3? I'm not following this.

Meaning---- no one will be able to tell the fucking difference anyway.

I've used FLAC for ages. What's new with this format?

I use FLAC mostly for classical music,jazz or just music where I don't want to lose any info to compression.

A) those would cost a lot more than 99¢ so I'm sure people will just pirate them because they are cheap assholes.

b) at 900 kbps your average 4 minute song comes in at 26 MB. So one of those cheap 1 GB MP3 players would only hold about 40 songs. Of course if the MP3 player doensn't have the de-coder for it you'll just hear the regular MP3 anyways not the HD one. So I can imagine how much a "HD" MP3 player would cost especially when you're looking at at least 32 GB to hold 1200 songs.

Yep GatorB expect Apple to announce their new iPod iHD with ultra HD decoding chip.
$500 for the 50gb model.