Sound & Audio Formats
Lossless, lossy, and everything in between — pick a format to see how it actually compares. Runs in your browser — no server call, no tracking.
Why CDs Sample at 44.1kHz
The Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem (Harry Nyquist, 1928; formalized by Claude Shannon, 1949) proves you must sample at least twice the highest frequency you want to reproduce. Human hearing tops out around 20kHz, so 44.1kHz — with margin — became the CD standard, and still underlies most digital audio today.
MP3's Psychoacoustic Trick
Developed by Germany's Fraunhofer Institute and standardized in 1993, MP3 doesn't just compress data — it uses psychoacoustic masking research to discard sounds the human ear is statistically unlikely to perceive alongside louder ones, which is how it shrinks files so dramatically with only modest quality loss.
FLAC — Lossless, But Compressed
Released in 2001 by Josh Coalson, FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) proved you don't have to choose between file size and perfect fidelity — it compresses audio losslessly, typically to 50-60% of the original WAV size, with zero data discarded.
WAV — The Uncompressed Baseline
Developed by Microsoft and IBM in 1991, WAV typically stores audio completely uncompressed — the studio and archival standard precisely because there's no compression algorithm to introduce artifacts or become obsolete.