Hi-Res Download News (HDTracks, ProStudioMasters, Pono, etc.) & Software/Mastering Part 12**

Thanks. Very disappointing.
Gonna stick with my original Mercury CD's of the BTO stuff. IIRC, those are in the DR 12-13 range.

 

Market forces.

 

Yep. They iz a doin' dat in da mastering lab.

 

DR13?! Better luck those in a vault.

 

Nooooooooooo!!! (Just like Darth Vader at the end of episode 3.)

Yep. The idea is that everthing should sound good even on a crappy pair of dollar ear buds. Which is silly! Say you have a kick. Well if your earbuds produce no bass then you probably are not going to hear it. Solution - You trigger a sampled farting noise (not kidding or close to it.) that will follow the kick in your mix. So now even on crappy-ass-dollar-ear-buds you can hear the kick going fart....fart. fart fart...fart. Of course it won't be the real kick from a drum kit . Nope. Just some samples of mid frequency noise taking it's place. I do make a lot of jokes on here. Trust me members....This IS NOT ONE OF THEM. Oh, engineers do this with bass as well.

Jesus Christ!! Come on now...
Earbuds with a frequency response down to 90hz you can get for $30 Canadian dollars. Most people think my $80 (that includes tax) Apple Ur Beat 3s are super expensive. What?! Why is it that kids will spend $1500 on a Apple phone and yet bark at paying even $80 for a pair of ear buds.

I will tell them, "These are not audiophile earbuds. Most audiophiles consider these earbuds to be junk. I just want 20 - 20 000 hz +-3db. And I do not want too much treble. Unfortunately a lot of detail will mean more treble. The CX-300 Mark 2 is a way better earbud but it is too bright. I prefer the subdued sound of the Apple Ur Beat 3. It calms all those super bright remastered releases down.....Of course for my audiophile system at home I want accuracy. Don't use Beats there!......"

 

This thing should be called "Even in the Quietest Moments (it's not very quiet)"

 

FYI: Last week's "New" 96/24 of Grover Washington Jr is a DR15! I haven't played it yet.

 

Makes good sense to me, sounds like some people here are upset for the wrong reason, no reason to be mad at the process.

No full disclosure, really?
Body and Soul CD/SACD (SHIPPING NOW!)

Mastering Notes
Body and Soul's original PCM digital files are remastered to DSD by Kevin Gray at CoHEARent Audio. The results are amazing! Body and Soul has never sounded so big and full-bodied. In addition to the wonderful ambience of the Masonic Lodge, the imaging is more three-dimensional and holographic than ever, and the band more. dynamically explosive.

 

Thanks for the heads up, I had to go check it out - as Razor Love is one of my favorite songs of his - and my GOD it sounds so much better than the original release, I can feel the space it was recorded in. More than satisfied.

 

I was just going to post this myself. I think the "criticism" could've been handled better and I can understand (potentially) some disappointment with the release for some folks. That being said, however, there was most definitely full disclosure regarding the source of Body and Soul, not only on the main IR website, but within the main IR thread here as well.

If you read the whole IR thread, the B&S SACD was made due to a direct request request from fans. The original goal was just to master Body and Soul, a digital recording, to 2 45RMP LPs. However, the label owner always (almost?) gets a simultaneous DSD transfer done when obtaining a vinyl master. As time progressed and the request for an SACD kept coming, the owner reviewed the DSD files and ultimately decided that Kevin Gray had been able to eek something out of the tapes via his mastering that sounded better than the original CD.

You can see the progression of the discussion in the main thread. For example, back in April of 2020, when folks were asking about an SACD of Body and Soul, the owner posted the following:

New Record Label: Intervention Records

"They [the post was referring to other recordings initially] will be SACD too, except probably Body and Soul, which was a digital recording. Can't see people wanting PCM converted to DSD, but prove me wrong?"

There's also this posting regarding the original tape source: New Record Label: Intervention Records

The question was asked "I would be interested to know how the transfer was done for Joe Jackson's Body and Soul. I believe it was recorded on one of the earliest 3M digital mastering systems. does anyone have the equipment to play back those tapes now? When 3M launched it in 1978 it was 16-bit, 50 kHz. Was this still the case in 1984 or had they progressed to higher bitrate by then? Is there any advantage in converting 16 bit PCM to DSD?" The reply was "At some point they put it on 1630s which Universal or A&M transferred to something usable and we got those files. It's such a fascinating recording. One of the sources they had was an analog tape, and I got really really excited hoping it was a pure analog backup. But alas, at some point they back up the digital to analog!"

So, again, there was no attempt to dupe any buyers with this SACD. I bought it myself and knew exactly what I was getting, as I'd been following the thread for some time. I don't even have the original Body and Soul CD, I just wanted to hear what Kevin Gray could do with the tapes. Personally, I wasn't disappointed. Honestly, if there were no differences to be had in mastering digital sources, we wouldn't need mastering engineers; everything would just be a straight digital clones. The reality is, different engineers have different mastering chains and tools that can, to varying degrees, modify (enhance?) the overall sound (even on 100% digital recordings). In the case of something like Body and Soul, where an early digital tape was transferred to DSD, how much difference that makes is up to the listener. There were several other people who posted on the main IR thread that they compared the original Body and Soul CD to the SACD and preferred the SACD.

Like most things in life, I think it comes down to a matter of preference. Personally, I have many high resolution releases that are, in my opinion, night and day better than their original CD counterparts, while others are only mild to moderate improvements. Fortunately, I don't own any HR releases that I think are worse than the originals. Again, I think it comes down to personal preference as to how much of an improvement (if any) there is and how much said improvement might be worth to you. That's why we have forums like this so kind folks can post their opinions so those of us on the fence can make an informed decision.

All this being said, I think one could offload the B&B SACD pretty quickly and get most of your money back if one so desired.

 

I did not order from the Intervention web site. I ordered from Elusive disc.

 

As I mentioned upthread, Scott at Rubellan is doing an excellent job of this; though totally focusing on 80's & mostly synth based. I have his 2 Berlin cd's & his 2 DiVinyls. Of the 4, Berlin Love Life is the biggest improvement imo.

 

I'm gonna take it from this that You don't own any of the more recently released low DR messes currently being released and passed off as hi-res?

 

No I don't and my hats off to the folks here who have helped me avoid any potential "audio landmines" .

 

Thank you good to be back on track. I'd note that the new Wilco Summerteeth Deluxe on HDTracks is the same peak/DR/RMS as the 2014 version of the main album if anyone was wondering.

 

Haven't joined this thread yet, but do Hi Res stream via Qobuz count, as I have recently subscribed?

 

Absolutely! Especially since Qobuz is also a Hi-res download store.

 

This is interesting, because the 3M system recorded at more than 44.1kHz (it was a 50kHz system). So right off the bat, this is a "high-res" recording compared to standard 44.1kHz Red Book audio.

Also, I don't think there's any easy way to get the digital data off of it, because the units were all custom-tweaked to make up for nonlinearity issues in the early A/D converters - each channel's A/D converter had to be matched to a D/A converter with complimentary linearity issues! (Actually each channel had TWO A/D converters to further complicate things - a 12 bit and an 8-bit - because 16-bit converters didn't exist yet in quantity. The extra 4 bits were used for parity checking to ensure there were no errors.). So if you did just digitally rip the data, you'd get a mess with linearity issues. I suppose you could analyze the converters and come up with an algorithm to adjust everything, but that would be a lot of work. I doubt anybody would do it.

Anyhow, because of all that, you can't really get the digital data off of these things - there are only a handful left working anywhere in the world - and you need to carefully play the tapes back and capture the analog output, using those D/A converters that are properly matched with their A/D counterparts. So this is a great example of why you'd absolutely want to use high-res to capture this "digital" master and perform any subsequent processing.

(Note: this applies more to the 32-track mulitracks than to any 2-track final mixdowns, since the A/D and D/A converters reserved for the two-tracks generally had the least linearity issues, which means it should be a non-issue. Still, they're at an oddball 50kHz sample rate, which means you'd have to hunt down or build software to properly convert it to some other rate, which you'd want to be an upsample, so you'd still end up with a high-res file to capture these as best as possible even if you did keep it all in the digital domain.)

One other point - that 3M deck was a "spare no expense" affair and supposedly had the best analog components of any deck made up until that time. I think many of the recordings it made - like Fagen's The Nightfly and Christopher Cross - are some of the best-sounding recordings ever made, early digital or not. And I suspect at least some of that has to do with the system's analog components. So preserving these recordings in high-res is a no-brainer, even if they were very early digital recordings.

 

I was just listening to the Kinks Schoolboys In Disgrace SACD/DSD for the first time in a long time. In my opinion, this is the best sounding version of this Kinks album I have ever listened to. And I have the OP vinyl and the cd that came out in 1998.
Forgive me for being uneducated here, but my question is: If I purchase DSD albums from HDTracks, can I make a cd copy of the album in DSD so I can play on my BlueRay/SACD player? I don't know if listening from my MacBook Pro using JRiver Media Center 27 will play and I don't want to waste the money on something I won't be able to use.

 

Behind here. Listening to Hendrix Are You Experienced. Sound is magnificent to me. This is my go-to at this point. I had Axis and wasn't happy with it but that's before I upgraded. I have to check that out now.

 

The answer is likely "maybe". The usual and most flexible way is through USB output into a player that will accept the USB in what they call D0P (which wraps DSD files in a FLAC format folder). Although there are now a number of DACs that will accept a DSD signal in "native form".

JRiver will play DSD files but sometimes it converts them to FLAC. I am not very familiar with JRiver so you will need to work your way through its many options. If you can output DSD files from your MacBook to your Sony BR via USB, it may just work. Just be sure that the "rate" of the DSD files you buy doesn't exceed what your player can process. Check the manuals or help files.

 

Thanks for the taking the time to answer my question. I will do the research.

 

In 2008 we lost the master tapes of Chuck Berry, BB King and The Duke, but somehow the master tapes of "Meet The Brady Bunch" seem to have survived the fire intact, or at least a decent safety of the tapes, as that one sounds quite good compared to the other Universal batch that was recently released. I know, "How could anything sung by the Brady Bunch sound 'quite good'?" is what you're thinking, and I understand your sentiments. Maybe Marcia Brady rescued the tapes from the 2008 fire before it was too late... Could have been an exciting reunion episode for the show.

 

Yes, go do the research. So many acronyms that it is easy to get lost. The way to play downloaded DSD files is through a DSD capable DAC.

In a nutshell.
DoP is DSD over PCM. There is no flac involved. It is DSD sent through packets that look like PCM. Then reassembled as DSD by the DAC after it receives the packets. It was designed because Apple refused to acknowledge DSD. So the work around was created to hide DSD inside what looks like a PCM stream.
Flac is a container holding PCM using a compression algorithm so it takes up less space. Flac has nothing to do with DSD.
DSF is the compressed version of a DSD file. Similar to how Flac is a compressed version of a PCM file.

There is no DSD on a cd, so you can't burn a DSD download to a cd then replay it. You might be able to burn an ISO image if you can create one, then burn it to a DVD. I don't know. Never tried or looked into that.