I know why they do it, but it's not helping.
Xmos, a UK company I know and admire, sells processor chips. They're massively multicore and deterministic, acting more like programmable hardware than classic processors but (unlike FPGAs, for example) are easy to program. As a result, they're good at stuff that needs a lot of real-time data handled with low latency, such as audio processing.
Audio is a big part of Xmos' market, and that's good. Digital audio has made huge quantities of high-quality speech and music part of everyone's lives. Those of us who grew up before CDs were invented have some idea how remarkable the past forty years have been: the younger lot, however, take near-universal access at near-zero cost to practically perfect audio as their birthright. There is a lot more pleasure out there for the taking, and the world is much the better for it.
But not everyone is happy. One big problem is that people have stopped buying hi-fis - or, rather, people never buy them in the first place. Older people still do, but they're dying out. Those below 40 are used to having their music delivered by phone, laptop and tablet: they buy powered speakers or a sound bar, and perhaps they buy expensive headphones, but an amp, tuner and deck? Get hip, daddio.
The other thing people no longer do is repurchase music. I think my personal record for one particular piece of recorded sound is nine - cassette, 7" single, 12" single, LP, live LP, live video, CD, remastered CD - but then I never bothered with 8-track or pre-recorded Minidisc, and by the time DVDs arrived I'd gone online, never to return.
Large industries relied on both these long-lost activities, and aren't giving up without a fight. To persuade us to buy more kit and all our favourite music yet again, the audio industry and the recording industry have got together to sell us High Resolution Audio! And Xmos is playing its part.
High Resolution Audio is fantastic. It has virtually no limits on the number of bits per audio sample it can support, and no particular end to how many samples a second it can disgorge. And, of course, it eschews all that nasty audio compression like MP3 which excised large chunks of the music in order to keep the files manageable in the days that memory, disk storage and bandwidth all cost serious money Now we have huge memories and super-fast broadband, say the industry coven, we can at last escape the chains of Bad Audio and bathe in the sweet, sunlit waters of the Good Stuff.
If only it were true.
It isn't. Well-compressed audio is indistinguishable from uncompressed audio, because the bits that have been thrown away are the bits we don't actually perceive. You won't hear any difference when things are sampled faster than the old CD standard, because it - like audio compression - was designed to match our abilities as humans. And CD as an audio medium is better by any technical measure (dynamic range, noise, stability) than vinyl - which, curiously, is often touted as an example of 'better' audio. Which it isn't
We know all this not just because of numbers on a page, but because you can do any number of scientific listening tests to prove it. (You can do any number of tests to disprove it, but they ain't scientific.) The whole business is as daft as the TV industry deciding to sell us all sets that can reproduce ultraviolet and infrared for 'more realistic' pictures.
And if you're engaged in something that even the TV industry finds too shameful to contemplate... boy.
The good news is that, by and large, people aren't buying it. Neil Young's Toblerone-styled Pono player/service has met with derision. (This from a demographic that thinks Beats headphones are a good idea.) Tidal looks like a wash-out from day one. There's enough knowledge out there on the Web about Nyquist and dynamic range and noise floors and generally sound audio engineering that there's no excuse for not knowing the truth. Moreover, you can sell high-quality audio stuff to the digital generation without the flap-doodle.
Which is why I think Xmos is doing itself a disservice by publicly backing the high-resolution audio circus. It doesn't need to do this: if designers want to build high-resolution audio circuits, they'll find the specs of the Xmos products do the job. But the company risks being seen as willing to market nonsense over sound engineering, and I'm not sure a component company that sells to engineers and wants a public profile of competence and trustworthiness needs that.
There is a lot wrong with digital audio, but little or none of it is down to the format. There are tons of very bad products out there - headphones, speakers - and even more atrociously recorded/mixed/produced/compressed content. Xmos could cheerfully campaign against that, even producing reference designs for systems that highlight such sins and, if at all possible, militate against them. And there's no sin in pointing out that its components can go as wide and as fast as you like.
Just don't promote the woo. It sounds awful.
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