On my 13th birthday, my parents gave me a portable CD player and the masterpiece that was Fresh Hits 1997. Like more than 600 million other people, I have long since swapped my box of CDs for the Spotify app on my phone. But I found my old birthday present recently and discovered it still worked.
Even using headphones from the 1990s, I was staggered by the richness of the sound. My ears didn’t deceive me. CDs have a bit-rate of 1411 kilobits per second, which is a measure of how much data is used to represent sound. Spotify Premium ranges from 24 kilobits to 320 kilobits, while free Spotify listeners are limited to 160 kilobits at best.
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Financial Times
Sarah O'Connor is a columnist, reporter and associate editor at the Financial Times. She writes a weekly column focused on the world of work, as well as longer reported articles.
