"Hi-Res" recordings... part 3 (the Vinyl revenge...)

Okay... so now it's time for the turn of the vinyl.  For a while my LynxTWO has been out of action (the input stage has failed multiple times over the past ~14 years, quite annoying on such an expensive card... it will eventually get fixed again one day when I can be bothered...), so I had to press the E-Mu 1820M into action instead.  The noise floor is slightly lower than the Lynx, but the distortion is slightly higher.  Still plenty good enough to be compared to the other sources, as it uses good quality AK5394A A/Ds.  I will be using my old John Linsley Hood shunt-feedback phono stage, powered off the original power supply.

For a while now I've been using a Lyra instead of the Shure V15VxMR with JICO SAS stylus... while the V15+SAS is a superb combination, as is often the way with audio, when you hear something slightly better, it's hard to go back.  The Lyra has a very wide frequency response as in common with most high performance Moving Coil cartridges... the distortion is also very low, I have measured it to be lower than the Shure, which is somewhat more unusual for a MC.

I recorded each track, and then resized as best I could, matching the RMS power to make it a representative test.

First up is the 4Beards reissue, 4M101...

You can immediately see that there is a lot more transient energy above 22K (as in, it actually has some) than with the HDTracks download.  The mix and sonic tone is very similar to the HDTracks... next I took out my early copy of the Atlantic LP, SD8139.  It isn't in perfect condition, but it's very hard to find a mint one these days... the cut is almost identical in loudness to the 4Beards reissue, but the band compression seems to be slightly different.  Big difference in frequency range...

Okay... that's a lot more going on at the top!  Mix isn't quite as spacious, but there's a bit more bite to it... I guess that's due to the extended top end.

Comparing all of them in the 10K-40K range across the whole track...

But it becomes most obvious when you zoom into a small space in the music....

... just how much information the so-called "Hi-Res" version of the music is lacking.

So all I can really say is, buyer beware... my own recommendation is that unless you can be certain of the provenance of the high resolution material, you are better off finding a good pressing of the vinyl.  If we consider the 4Beards reissue for a moment, for me it sounds better than the "Hi-Res" from HDtracks and is actually about the same price to buy.  And you get a real "thing", which you can keep or sell at your leisure.

So why bother with the download?  Good question.  Convenience might be a reason, but bear in mind that you can get a CD of this album which you can rip in a few minutes, and by all accounts will not be inferior to the 24/192 version - at the time of writing this, there's a copy for 3.46GBP on eBay.

I'm getting my hands on an early version of the CD and will compare it to the 24/192 HDTracks in due course, but I think we're done with the surprises for now... :)