If you’re anything like the girl on the right, you probably enjoy your mp3 music as it is. But if you’re a serious audiophile, you may already be left raging at the amount that mp3 files miss out to keep the file size in the single digits. If that sums you up, then it’s time to celebrate, because Thomson – one of the companies to come up with the original mp3 format – has developed MP3HD technology.

What does this mean to you? Well potentially nothing if it doesn’t pick up, but if it does then you can expect higher quality audio with less sound loss than conventional mp3s. Mp3s achieve their svelte file size by discarding various bits of audio that the algorithm considers expendable. It essentially means that what you’re hearing will always be of inferior quality to the original CD source, though it’s questionable as to how many can tell the difference. In the days of smaller mp3 players (32mb ones used to be the norm, remember) this loss of quality was essential, but with flash memory and hard disk sizes growing every day, we can afford to be a little more selective in what should be left out.