Owen Smith
1K Club - QQ Shooting Star
I never bought anything from HD Tracks because they were so expensive.
Thanks for the reply! Some keywords I see are past tense, "have been" and "was". At the risk of stating the obvious these changes are not just generational human wise but technology wise as well. People loved to work on their hot rods in the 50's because that was the affordable & accessible technology. They did that because they had yet to discover Atari Pong or build their own PC's.Those drinkie poo's help with a lot of things, and yes they do add to click-itis.
If I have a CD and HDTracks releases it in 24/96 or 24/192 I likely will purchase the download and it is worth it.
If I have a CD and it gets released in 24/44.1 I will not. That would be around 25-30 dollars for one piece of music, double dipped, not worth it.
Lets see, I have been a bottle collector, music collector, stamp and coin collector, I was a rock n roll concert poster collector also.
Funny that all of my collecting even with my music now has been the same. The funnest part about being a collector is the documentation of your collection. It was always fun back in the day when it was all pen and paper, now it is all computer based and super easy.
I use PayPal on Qobuz France and haven't had a problem yet.On some sites they also require that you use a credit card issued in that country to avoid the VPNers.
Tightening up the requirements.
If there is an audible improvement of high res vs CD then that's just what it is. It may come frfom better mastering, better ad convertors & a higher res format will convey these improvements. The DR on a recording is important but I see an over emphasis on the statistics. It's only one aspect of a recording quality & fails to tell anything about the other audible elements. I would never avoid a musical purchase based on someones DR stat nor would I buy something I only have a mild interest in because it has good DR.When people hear a difference between the CD and the hi-rez release, it's really the mastering differences that they are hearing. CDs still have a lot of dynamic compression added at the mastering stage, and, unfortunately, the more recent hi-rez releases do, too. I check the Dynamic Range Database, dr.loudness-war.info, first to see if the more expensive resolutions are worth it.
When all things are equal, CD equality (16 bit/44.1 kHz) sounds pretty darn good. Take the HD Audio Challenge, HD-Audio Challenge II: Preliminary Results | Real HD-Audio, and try it for yourself. Tracks recorded digitally at 24 bit/96 kHz are compared to the same tracks resampled to 16 bit/44.1 kHz and then put back in a 24 bit/96 kHz container so that people couldn't tell the difference by looking at the spectrum with Audacity or some other audio tool. The success rate for picking out the hi-rez track by listening is about 50%.
For old albums that have analog sources, the differences heard are most likely a different A/D conversion and/or the mastering after the conversion. For these reasons, many hi-rez releases sound better than the CD release, but I still buy the 16 bit/44.1 kHz version from HDtracks because it's cheaper and it's likely resampled from 24 bit/ 96 or 192 kHz. As the HD Audio Challenge has shown me, it sounds just as good.
The DR on a recording is important but I see an over emphasis on the statistics. It's only one aspect of a recording quality & fails to tell anything about the other audible elements. I would never avoid a musical purchase based on someones DR stat nor would I buy something I only have a mild interest in because it has good DR.
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