The Road to High-Resolution Audio in Three Steps

[GuillaumeB]

The man fights a lonely but important battle.

Can you elaborate on this Pim?

Guillaume

Sure. I just checked and I have 242 daily emails from Mark Weldrop (Dr. Aix) so far. He wants the world to embrace high res music but commerce gets in the way of 'real' high res. For example; in Japan they came up with a standard for high res that includes high res from recording to play system. Then the big American companies came together and came up with their version of a standard which simply embraces the use on any old analog or cd quality recoding as long as you copy it to 24/96.

For the big companies 'high res' means 'new way of selling the same old catalog all over again'

Just imagine buying a blu-ray of a movie only to find out that it was originally recorded on 8mm. It's been cleaned up a bit and they saturated the hell out of the colours (a bit like dynamic compression making things sound 'better)
You wouldn't buy it would you?

I'm all for the use of 24/96 to copy old recordings and when well done they can be very enjoyable. I'm listening to Nina Simone; Pastel Blues in 24/96 right now and it sounds great... but it includes the original tape hiss. Not a issue at all but it shouldn't be regarded as high res, just a (very enjoyable) high quality recording of an old recording of an artist who passed away before high res was invented. The best you can get.

Mark wants to educate his readers and he mostly keeps it simple enough. If someone else writes something that explains things better than he can he copies a link to the article in his emails. It was him who pointed me to MQA (the future?) Plangent processing (a way to digitally correct old tape speed whilst re-recording) and others. He does a great job, Just a shame nobody is 'listening'

Great, thanks for sharing this. On the few occasions where I have compared a good RBCD rip to a 24 bit of various sample rates I have struggled to tell the difference. Having said that I have some excellent 24/192 (and 24/96) recordings which I wouldn't want to get rid of. And I continue to buy so-called high-res tracks from companies like HD Tracks and Qobuz... so I suppose I'm undecided and prefer to hedge my bets with the more expensive tracks. I wonder if I'm the only one doing this?

I have to say I'm very excited by MQA as I think this whole digital format thing desperately needs a shake up. I'm just not convinced that digital tracks sound as good as they could. I should add that I am a die-hard streamer and haven't played a CD in many years.


Guillaume