I see that Tidal offers FLAC format, and I guess it’s streaming only. At $20 a month it’s probably a niche/boutique market, but it certainly exists. I don’t think that relates directly to recording in 96k, which is what I was initially talking about (recording only, not necessarily mixed/mastered formats). For some years I was paying $12 a month to eMusic, but that was for 30 downloads per month, not streaming only.
TIDAL’s HiFi tier gives subscribers all the same great content and experiences as a Premium subscription, except music is delivered in lossless, CD and Master Quality Authenticated (MQA) quality (1411 kbps vs. 320 kbps for standard streaming).
HiFi streaming delivers an uncompressed sound file, which means that you can hear every instrument and every note – as the artist intended. This tier costs $19.99 per month.
I don’t know if this article talks about that specifically, but even though it’s a few years old it seems to cover a lot of ground in terms of high-resolution audio.
I found this interesting, the text was near the Whiteboard diagram about halfway down the page.
Sampling rates over 48kHz are irrelevant to high fidelity audio data, but they are internally essential to several modern digital audio techniques. Oversampling is the most relevant example.
Oversampling is simple and clever. You may recall from my A Digital Media Primer for Geeks that high sampling rates provide a great deal more space between the highest frequency audio we care about (20kHz) and the Nyquist frequency (half the sampling rate). This allows for simpler, smoother, more reliable analog anti-aliasing filters, and thus higher fidelity. This extra space between 20kHz and the Nyquist frequency is essentially just spectral padding for the analog filter.
This means we can use low rate 44.1kHz or 48kHz audio with all the fidelity benefits of 192kHz or higher sampling (smooth frequency response, low aliasing) and none of the drawbacks (ultrasonics that cause intermodulation distortion, wasted space). Nearly all of today’s analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) and digital-to-analog converters (DACs) oversample at very high rates. Few people realize this is happening because it’s completely automatic and hidden.