I'm extremely late to the party, but will agree that hirez does NOT mean hi-fidelity if the mastering is done poorly. I plunked down change for HDtracks Frampton Comes Alive and was VERY disappointed at the sound. Very compressed. I can live with the fact that a spectral analysis shows no energy at all north of about 18 kHz - a limitation of the original tape no doubt - but the sound is squashed, all the ambiance of the venues is gone. In my opinion of course. But, it is like the whole "I'll buy the vinyl version because it forces engineers to use less brutal limiting/compression" idea - completely, and demonstrably, flawed reasoning. Ironically, with all the dynamic range 24/96 offers, they could easily release stuff with very little compression and you'd still be able to have a tremendous amount of dynamic range in the music.
Attached is a waveform of the first song of the album, three masterings: Top is HDTracks 24/96, middle is MFSL, bottom is 1st release A&M CD. Original image is: http://gromit.orf5.com/pics/fcawaveform.png I won't buy stuff from HDTracks anymore until I have heard from others, if possible, that the mastering is good. And this one was done by Doug Sax of all people, who has a history of doing good remastering jobs (think Pink Floyd). Oh well, this discussion is for another forum. +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Filename: fcawaveform.jpg | |Download: http://forums.slimdevices.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=10146| +-------------------------------------------------------------------+ -- Leigh ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Leigh's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=10619 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=74688 _______________________________________________ Touch mailing list Touch@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/touch
