Technology and music make odd bedfellows. While digital music and Macs make music creation easier than ever, the quality of our music is going backwards: many people think vinyl to CD was a backwards step, and there’s no doubt that a compressed MP3 or AAC is far inferior to a CD, never mind a higher quality master recording. And let’s not talk about YouTube clips on laptop speakers. For many people that’s fine – Apple’s iPhone and earbud combination isn’t great, but it isn’t truly terrible either – but not everybody puts portability first. For them, sound quality is what really matters, and they’re willing to pay serious money to get it. High-Resolution Audio (HRA) is for those people.