Audio

Audiophiles regularly listen to music from compact discs (CDs), records, and frequency-modulation (FM) radio. Since the early 1990s, CDs have become the most common source of high-quality music, taking over the LP record; the CD player now serves as the default source component for most people. Due to record collectors, the extensive back-catalogue of recordings not available on CD, and the perceived better sound quality of vinyl records, vinyl remains popular in some circles. The debate is particularly sharp in this area, with analog proponents claiming a warmer analog sound and loss of information in the sampling process in digital sound, while digital proponents decry analog formats as lacking dynamic range and being not flat in terms of frequency response. Nevertheless, turntables, tonearms, and cartridges are among the most exotic and lavish high-end audio products available today.

The 44.1 kHz sampling rate of the CD format, in theory, restricts CDs information losses to above the upper frequency limit of human hearing of approximately 20kHz (see Nyquist limit). Some critics argue that there are still deleterious effects on the sound quality at this sampling rate. Newer formats such as DVD-Audio and Super Audio Compact Disc (SACD) with sampling rates of 96 kHz or higher have been developed in an attempt to address this criticism.

Despite the popularity of the MP3 digital audio players such as the iPod in the consumer marketplace, many audiophiles dislike listening seriously to music in these formats due to the degraded sound quality. The digital compression used is a compromise between storage capacity and sound quality, as information lost due to the lossy data compression used is proportional to the compression rate used. In general, audiophiles try to avoid such loss of audio information as much as possible.

Audiophiles who own a digital audio player will often encode their music at higher bit rates to maintain sound quality loss at acceptable levels for casual listening. In particular, the Fraunhofer MP3 encoder offers near-CD quality at moderate bitrates for those willing to wait through its sluggish encoding process. The use of lossless-compression algorithms such as Apple Lossless, Windows Media Audio 9 Lossless, Monkey's Audio (APE), Shorten, and FLAC is also common. Some would prefer to use WAV or AIFF files—copied from CDs directly to a HDD storage medium—without any further compression.