"Hi-Res" recordings... part 2

So I headed over to www.hdtracks.co.uk for the first time in what was a very long time... so long in fact that my account had been quietly closed!  Would have been nice if they'd mentioned that.  In any case, the reason I had stopped visiting is due to licensing restrictions... I couldn't buy anything I wanted to buy as it wasn't available in the UK.

Nice to see it has been sorted out, the vast majority are now available.  So I purchased a handful of albums, at considerable cost... most of the albums in 24/192 seem to be priced around 18GBP - for a well known classic, you could probably pick up a second hand CD in the region of 4-5GBP, so this is quite a premium for the privilege of downloading a few files.  The 96kHz downloads are slightly cheaper, but I wanted the 192kHz for downsampling tests with FinalCD.

I listened to the albums I knew well, and I have to say that I was somewhat underwhelmed.  I have encountered this with "Hi-Res" recordings before, as I said in Part 1... there are a couple of reasons why this may be, but they weren't awful by any means.

In particular, I listened to Aretha Franklin's "Never Loved A Man The Way I Love You" in 24/192... it sounded, well... pretty poor.  Maybe not a great recording.  The 4 Beards vinyl version I have was not quite as rough.  So I went and had a look at the FFT for track 1...

Not a lot happening above 22K or so there... what about an average across the whole file?  You wouldn't expect it to be perfectly flat as that implies random noise which will cancel out...

Hm.  Nothing.  At all, just noise with a few idle tones.  I had a look through the whole file and there's nothing up there other than noise and a stray tone, centred on 76.8kHz, presumably from the A/D converter.  Here's the spectral, focusing on the 10K-30K band...

Hm.  Not looking good.

There's no question in my mind that this has been A/D'd at 24/192, the noise floor is too strange to explain otherwise.  What is rather open to question is what was the source feeding the A/D converter.  For an analogue converter to brickwall like that would highly, highly unusual.  I checked all the other 24/192 recordings I bought, and there was nothing like this... for example... Joni Mitchell's All I Want...

... looks natural and genuine.  Of course it is possible to "fake" a Hi-Res recording but the Aretha Franklin looks to me like it could have been taken from a CD source... and if so, a slightly ropey D/A at that, one with a very high noise floor, given the low pass filter visible in the noise floor.  That might would suggest a 1-bit converter from the mid 90s... or it might just be a very noise reel to reel tape, who knows.

I contacted HDTracks to complain, and their response was disappointing at best.  They pointed out that they do not record or master the tracks, no-one else had complained about the album, and that if I had a problem, to take it up with the record company.

I pointed out their page about Quality commitment, which drew silence.  It seems they are very happy to take your money and then point the finger at someone else when a customer questions the quality being offered.  I find it hard to accept that the Aretha album can be called "Hi-Res"... either the master source simply has no content above 22kHz (which I suppose could be possible) or the source for this "high-res" master is actually a 16-bit 44.1kHz or 48kHz digital copy which has been played through a poor quality D/A and captured in 24/192 to pass HDTracks' "quality tests".

Even a cursory examination of the spectral analysis should have flagged this up (which HDtracks claim to do in their Quality commitment page), so it is clear that HDtracks do not vet their files very carefully, despite what they claim.

To try and get to the bottom of this, I'm obtaining some early vinyl of this classic album to see whether there really isn't a version out there with content above 22kHz... it will be interesting to find out!  I also have an early Japanese CD version of the album coming to compare the general sound quality with.

Something to bear in mind - when you pay for downloaded music, you have nothing to "sell on"... if you are not happy, you may be lucky and get a refund.  If not, you would appear to have little recourse.  It seems to be known that the "quality tests" at HDTracks have varied results - I doubt they are unique in this as they do not generate the material, only sell it, but some baseline of quality was to be expected from a company coming from Chesky...

I do hope these companies start to take quality a little more seriously, as it rather undermines Hi-Res downloads as a whole and will eventually unravel their massive margin when people realise they a) can't be sure if they are getting something better than CD quality and b) they are left with a rubbish bunch of 1s and 0s and a hole in their bank balance...

Frankly, rather than spending 18 quid on a download, get a decent physical pressing of these albums on Vinyl, where possible.  It may cost slightly more, but you will have something which you can enjoy, something you can touch, and in a lot of cases something which will actually retain value.  Your downloads are worth $0 once you have paid for them... !