iTunes’ ‘higher-quality’ downloads

If you’re a regular purchaser from iTunes, you may have stumbled across the occasional, and rather discreet, label attached to a new release that states 
it has been ‘Mastered for iTunes’. Before I explain 
what this means, I must admit that I’m not entirely convinced that this is a milestone on a discernible, straightforward path, a staging post to something altogether more appealing (lossless audio from 
Apple) or simply a red herring.

In a nutshell, when you buy a recording from iTunes, the file has been taken from the CD (which is sampled at 16-bit, 44.1kHz) and then compressed using Apple’s proprietary algorithm AAC (Advanced Audio Coding) – not unlike MP3, the ‘lossy’ format used almost everywhere else – before being made 
available to download (the highest bit-rate Apple offers is the 256kbps AAC iTunes Plus format). 
The resulting file size is roughly 20 per cent of the equivalent CD; and inevitably the sound quality has been degraded. (How much people can tell varies enormously, and for the bulk of music lovers who are plugged into their iPods – or, more likely, iPhones – in a generally noisy ambience, the convenience clearly far outweighs the shortcomings.) For the classical music buff, there are certain genres of music that do show up the degradation quite clearly: personally, I think that piano music 
and polyphony are the most revealing.

Mastered for iTunes goes back a stage further 
in the recording process and, rather than use the 
CD to create the AAC file, takes the studio master (24-bit, 192kHz) and compresses it to AAC. The thinking is that, if there’s more there to start with, the resulting file will be of a higher quality. I tried the recent release of Philip Glass’s Ninth Symphony in the Mastered for iTunes download, but the sound is so synthetic that it has more of the feel of a pop mix than a classical recording. One label well represented, though, is LSO Live, and I compared the CD of Gergiev’s Rachmaninov Symphonic Dances with the Mastered for iTunes download; the quality is good – though I’m not sure there was a huge difference between the Mastered for iTunes file and the 256kbps AAC file I ripped from the CD – and it 
costs no more than ‘standard’ offerings.

If this is a stepping stone on the way to lossless files from iTunes (and, given the exponential rise of hard-disk storage capacity, we’ll soon have enough to store vast amounts of data), it’s of some interest. But at the moment I do wonder whether it’s not 
a confusing little cul-de-sac.

James Jolly