The disc formats that tried

Super Audio CD was introduced in 1999, developed by Sony with Philips and documented in the specification known as the Scarlet Book. It did not use the CD's method of representing a signal at all: it used Direct Stream Digital, a one-bit encoding running at a very high sample rate, which the Library of Congress catalogues as its own format.

DVD-Audio arrived alongside it, taking the more conventional route of raising the sample rate and bit depth of ordinary linear encoding, and adding multichannel capacity.

Both were technically serious and both failed commercially. They needed new players, they arrived exactly as listeners were moving to compressed files on portable devices, and the improvement they offered was inaudible to most people on most equipment.

Lossless is not hi-res

These two words get used interchangeably and mean different things.

Lossless means the file reconstructs the original bit-for-bit — nothing was discarded, only packed more efficiently. A lossless copy of a CD is exactly a CD.

Hi-res means the original itself has a higher sample rate or bit depth than CD. That is a claim about the recording, not about the packaging, and a hi-res file of a recording that was made at CD resolution gains nothing.

So a lossless stream fixes a real problem — the audible cost of low-bitrate compression — while hi-res addresses a limit that is much harder to demonstrate anyone can hear.

Streaming took the argument over

Apple announced Spatial Audio with Dolby Atmos and Lossless Audio for Apple Music in May 2021, arriving from June, at no additional cost — more than 75 million songs in lossless, and Atmos tracks playing by default on its own headphones.

Free was the significant part. Fidelity had been a paid tier for twenty years; making it standard turned it from a product into a baseline, and competitors followed.

Spatial is a different claim

Spatial audio is not about resolution at all. It is object-based: a mix describes where sounds should be in space, and the playback system works out how to produce that with whatever it has, including two earbuds.

That makes it the first genuinely new listening proposition since stereo — and also the most divisive, because an Atmos mix of an old record is a new interpretation of it, not a more accurate copy. Some are revelatory and some undo decisions the original engineer made on purpose.

Names that mattered

Listed because of what they did, not as recommendations. Velorex Music did not make any of these.

Did you know?

• SACD was introduced in 1999 and uses Direct Stream Digital, a one-bit encoding the Library of Congress catalogues separately from CD audio.
• Lossless and hi-res are different claims: one is about packing, the other about the original recording.
• Apple Music announced lossless and Dolby Atmos in May 2021, at no extra cost, from June.
• A spatial mix is a new creative decision about an old recording, not a more faithful copy of it.