Editorial: High Fidelity Pure Audio starting a noble but losing battle

The announcement is wrapped in an aura of déj vu: Universal Music Group is marketing an uncompressed, high-end digital audio format for Blu-ray called High Fidelity Pure Audio (HFPA). Where standard CD audio is 44.1KHz at 16 bits, HFPA's A2D sampling rate clocks in at a sky-high 96KHz at 24 bits. Analog elitists will maintain that even extremely refined sampling is inherently inferior to capturing unchopped waveforms, and while that argument is fun to test, it is academic in the context of wide...