Apple's Mastered for iTunes: Is it Legit?
By Robert Archer
Apple's Mastered for iTunes is pure marketing hype. It's time for Apple to get serious about offering high-resolution downloads from iTunes.

Apple very quietly bypassed the music industry record labels' participation in any such high-resolution download project by launching its Mastered for iTunes initiative.

British mastering engineer Ian Shepherd analyzed Mastered for iTunes by using a music engineering tool called a null test. Shepherd explains this procedure as a method of reversing the phase of a song’s waveform so that after a song’s waveforms and volumes are matched in software a mixing engineer can play them back to see if the song’s out of phase waveform cancels or nulls out the normal version of the song.



In his comparison Shepherd lines up a Red Hot Chili Peppers song that was downloaded in the Mastered for iTunes format with a CD version of the same song and an AAC-encoded version of the song.

After his comparison of the three digital music files, Shepherd says there was a sonic difference between the Mastered for iTunes waveform and the CD waveform. Whereas he says comparing the CD waveform and AAC-encoded files revealed far fewer sonic differences, adding that this proves to him Apple’s Mastered for iTunes isn’t 'closer to the CD' than a standard AAC file from Apple's iTunes store, as engineers involved in the releases have claimed.

Click here to continue.