...and the winner? You'll need to scroll down! Background: after decades of owning progressively-better rigs, two weeks ago I "maxed out" the stereo in my main listening room, our carpeted 19 foot x 28 foot basement recreation room. As in, I don't believe I will ever own finer equipment in this lifetime. It starts with a dedicated ReadyNAS Pro 2 box with a fast HDD in the server closet whose sole purpose in life is to host LMS and about 8,300 uncompressed WAV CD rips for the five Squeezeboxes strategically positioned throughout our house, all wired in-wall CAT6. For this room the player is an SB3 Classic, AudioQuest Carbon digital coax cable to a Yamaha Aventage RX-A3060 receiver (Yamaha's current flagship AV receiver), a pair of Klipsch RP-280 dual-8" towers (62 pounds weight each--cherry finish, of course), Klipsch R-112SW sub crossed over at 60 Hz so the towers will handle bass guitar, the sub is more or less just for bass drum. I use analog outputs in the rest of the house but this Yamaha has a superb DAC that trumps the SB3, so I'm using digital outputs in this room.
Although the sound was like nothing I have ever heard, in a way I was sad that now I had nothing to shoot for. It doesn't get any better than this. Now what? Oh wait! I had heard about those fancy 96 KHz / 24-bit recordings. Let's find something new to blow money on! So I headed over to www.HDTracks.com, whipped out the credit card, and was soon the proud owner of some 96/24 and 48/24 versions of some CD's I already had in 44/16 WAV. This must be it! If anyone can hear a difference, I'm sure I will on this stereo in this room! First test: classic 70's Black Sabbath. I own the "Black Box" CD set of all 8 original Sabbath albums, remastered in 2004 with the mixing personally overseen by Sharon Osbourne (Ozzy's wife), and was sure that the HD version must have used this same recording as its source. WRONG! The HD versions were just higher-bitrate rips of some older garbage mud recording. It sounded AWFUL. Waste of $120 for the whole set. Second test: an album that has never been remastered, to rule out the quality of the mixing. Surely a newer album would rule out the risk of the remaster dictating the music quality rather than the bitrate and sample frequency since thats what I was testing. I chose Linkin Park - In The End. I made a playlist with just the CD 44/16 and HD 48/24 tracks, hit play, and hit fast forward about 25 times. I had no idea which file was which. Listen to the first 20 seconds. Fast forward. Listen to the first 20 seconds. Fast forward again. Repeat. Elongate sample length. Repeat. Finally choose a winner. Repeat Test 2 for "Disturbed - Overburdened" 96/24 and "Disturbed - Land Of Confusion" 96/24. Results? 3-0 in favor of... CD. They were incredibly close. Differences could entirely have been in my head, but for some reason I sensed something better about each of the tracks. Then I looked at the track properties to find out which one it was that I preferred. Statistically I should have seen a more even distribution, and probably should have done more tests, but 3-0 was a strong margin in my mind. Final verdict? Three lessons learned: 1. Don't assume that just because a recording is HD that uses a good master. We are still at the mercy of remastering studios and their whims of either doing a poor job or of calling it "remastered" when all they did is blast the volume so every track is clipping. 2. For newer albums, I can't tell a difference. Except an HD album sucks up 1.81 GB of hard drive space whereas the CD WAV takes up 569 MB. So the HD version is 3.26 times bigger. 3. There is a possibility that some bands will release remasters on HD but not release them on CD. I have not found this to be the case but it happens with Blu-ray all the time (where the DVD version stinks but the Blu-ray is gorgeous and sounds great.) But do your research very carefully before assuming this is the case. HD Audio... a great triumph of marketing over engineering. Oh wait, it flopped, it wasn't a triumph of marketing after all. Maybe this is why SACD and DVD-Audio are dead. So now I feel better about my 25 years worth of accumulated CD rips. CD truly is as good as it gets! Its as if those thousands of audio engineers at Sony and Phillips in the late 70s and early 80s actually thought this through when they invented the CD Digital Audio format. :) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Agent Smith's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=29954 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=107050
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