Hi-Def audio – a suckers game?
Are audio enthusiasts suckers? I believe so. Just after Christmas, as expected, HDTracks announced a 15% off sale, and having forgotten being burned by them in the past (with upsampled recordings), I purchased a series of 24/96 recordings: “Kind of Blue” (Miles Davis), “Moondance and His Band and the Street Choir” (Van Morrisson), “Atlantic Crossing” (Rod Stewart), “Byter Layter “(Nick Drake), “Soul Station” (Hank Mobley) and “Fleetwood Mac” (FM) amongst others. Never mind that I already have at least 2 CD versions of each of these recordings (usually original CD, remastered CD, then Deluxe Edition) and one or more versions on vinyl – here was my opportunity to have the definitive “Studio Masters” (incidentally I don’t see any point in 24/192) of great analogue recordings.
Having downloaded the recordings, from the much improved HD tracks download manager, to a laptop running JR Media Center 16 -> award winning Chord USB cable -> Benchmark DAC2 HGC -> Quad 909 -> B&W CM7, I sat back in my armchair to listen to these stunning recordings. And stunned I was – the sound quality was staggeringly unimpressive. My first port of call was Jonathan Wilson’s “Fanfare” (my album of the year). I have listened to this extensively on CD and on lossless rip on my new Sony Walkman (F886). The 24/88 recording sounded exactly the same. “Atlantic Crossing” is one of those great 1970s high budget analogue console big name producer (Tom Dowd in Criteria, Miami) recordings that should sound tremendous in high res. In 2010 the Mail on Sunday gave away a copy of this album on CD (free, gratis) – I put it on in the car and was blown away with the sound quality. I subsequently bought the 2009 deluxe edition that sounded about the same. I presumed that the 24 bit version would be sensational. It is not. Indeed, to my ears it doesn’t sound as good as the freebie from “the Mail.” Listening to other HDTracks downloads by Eric Clapton (Slowhand and Ocean Boulevard), Rumours by Fleetwood Mac and others gave me that self-same disappointed feeling.
Previously I had compared CD versions of albums that I had bought against the high res downloads or rips from DVDAs and thought that the 24 bit recordings were smoother, had more depth and better soundstaging – just like vinyl. The flaw, of course was whether I was listening to the same recording or mastering: CDs may have been mastered louder than SACDs, hence the lack of dynamics and soundstaging.
So does 24 bit sound better than 16 bit? The only way for me to find out was to use DBPoweramp to resample those HDTRacks recordings to 16/44.1 (really easy), and compare tracks. All other things should be equal. For this experiment I used: Laptop HDD -> JR Media Center 16 -> Dragonfly -> B&W P7 headphones. File after file, using this set up, I could not tell the difference for the majority of files (except for maybe Miles Davis (“So What”) and Wilco (Misunderstood from “Being There”) where there was improved soundstaging – but minimal). Where I can hear a huge difference between even the best MP3 file and a lossless 16 bit file, I really and honestly could not discern any great difference between the 16 and 24 bit files. Granted, both of my DACs upscale the 16 bit recordings – which presumably make them sound better. However, if you compare an upscaled DVD to HD versus the same movie in Blu-ray – there is a massive difference in resolution, contrast and clarity. Not so with so-called high resolution music. Not these recordings anyway – and why would they? How can you expect recordings done on relatively primitive analogue equipment from the 1950s through the 1980s produce dynamics that even begin to utilize more than 16 bits of data – and by inference more than 90Db of dynamic range? There is no doubt that if you listen to Telarc Classical SACDs, recorded in 24bits digitally, and switch between the CD and SACD layer – you will notice a clear difference in dynamics and soundstaging. And maybe this is the rub of the matter: if you want to hear high quality 24 bit digital recordings, perhaps you should check that the recording was made digitally in 24 bits: in this scenario – these are true studio masters. Linn, 2n, Society of Sound release such recordings, and they sound great. The music on HDTracks (and let’s face it they sell what will sell and what is popular) is just rehashing of music we already have that was recorded for vinyl and sounds best on vinyl.
I have bought into Hi Res in a fairly big way. I have dozens of SACDs, DVDAs, Dual Discs, High Res Downloads, Pure Audio and Video Blu-Ray discs. I am not saying for 1 minute that 24 bit formats don’t sound better than CDs. However, for the majority of recordings, particularly from the analogue era, we are deluding ourselves with “high resolution”. More and more I am coming to believe that recordings are best heard in their original intended format: vinyl from the 1950s to the 1980s, cassette in the mid 80s, CD – late 1980s to 2000, god only knows 2000-2012 (loudness war era – everything sounds awful on all formats), vinyl and high res (24 bit) today.
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