Is Hi Rez audio dead? (1 Viewer)

[jcroy]

I never bought a DualDisc. Basically every one of the transports I owned had a disclaimer in the manual similar to this "Some DualDiscs: A DualDisc is a two sided disc with DVD on one side and digital audio on the other side. The digital audio side does not meet the technical specifications of the Compact Disc Digital Audio (CD-DA) format so playback is not guaranteed." While I never either personally witnessed it or knew someone with a problem, some reported hardware issues while attempting to play a DualDisc.

Sounds like you own an audio cd / sacd / dvd-audio / etc ... disc player which was manufactured after the mid-2000s.

For over the past 20 years or so, I have not really used my cd player much for listening to music. Every time I purchased a new cd title, I just ripped the entire cd disc to the computer.

The few times I have used my old cd player in recent times, it was mostly when I was willing to devote my full attention to listening to a cd from start to finish. In contrast if I'm just playing music in the background, then I'll just play *.wav files on the computer.

 

[Sam Posten]

Lossless and Spatial music is FREE if you already have Apple Music which tens of millions of people already subscribe to. Prime Music and Tidal already support lossless and spatial tiers. No idea why you are suddenly pivoting Tom talking about who might switch services to get this feature. It’s available today.

 

[jcroy]

Stand along music stores have for the most part gone away. I used to watch when Tower (or even Borders) would have a sale and go for a vist and leave with a bunch of discs. It was hard to shop there at their regular prices. Tower used to carry Mobile Fidelity gold discs and charge $31.99 (regular price) for a disc that was $25 list price.

The few which still exist in various locales I have lived in over the past decade or so, were independent mom-and-pop operations which specialized in a lot of vinyl. Frequently also kept a stock of generic cd titles, and/or second handed used vinyl + cd + cassettes + 8-tracks + etc .....

 

[jcroy]

Blockbuster (remember their chain of stores) wayback then had a plan to allow customers to download custom music CDs (along with artwork) to their stores. They figured many people were buying standard CD albums where only a couple of the tracks were good. The record industry squashed that as it threatened their traditional distribution chain and if one looks at the chart of CD sales from about 20 years back to the present there is a clear pattern.

Years before Blockbuster kicked the bucket, I remember Blockbuster briefly had their own record stores in the mid-late 1990s with the same logos/branding as their video stores. Then one day, all those Blockbuster branded records stores were sold to another company, where all the stores changed the store front signs to something else. (I don't remember the subsequent owner).


I have to wonder if the major record companies forbidding this Blockbuster "custom music cds" thing, is what led to Blockbuster exiting the record store business.

 

[jcroy]

I too have a big selection of SACD discs and probably about 65 DVD-A discs as well as some DADs. Sometimes, before I make a purchase, I'll look here - https://dr.loudness-war.info/ as it does give some insight as to the nature of the recording quality.

Good site for examining brickwalling statistics.

As a general rule of thumb, I just consider anything pop/rock/country/hiphop/dance/etc .... first recorded after the mid-late 1990s and released on a major record label, to be automatically "brickwalled" if I have not listened it before. Same story with remasters of older albums, which are re-released by major record labels after the mid-late 1990s.

 

[jcroy]

One would think with the cost of storage capacity going down over a period of time that these services will continue to offer lossless quality. I think it is a really great alternative especially for customers who either don’t want extensive physical media or maintaining their own storage. It also can offer the ability to discover artists.

(On a tangent).

The difference between now and then, in regard to storage capacity greatly falling in price, is that nowadays I don't bother compressing my cd rips to *.mp3 or oggvorbis *.ogg files. I don't even bother with *.flac anymore either.

With storage space so inexpensive, I just leave everything as 44.1kHz/16bit *.wav files. I just rip an entire audio cd disc into one giant *.wav file, which I usually play in the background from start to finish when I'm at home.

 

[Pupp]

I don't think I would download hi-rez, even if I had decent unlimited broadband. (I live in the sticks).

I'd be interested in physical disks. And perhaps someday I'll get a decent turntable. (Something under a $1000, but prefer the $500 to $750 range) and start collecting vinyl. For a long time I was against vinyl, and there are arguments for and against vinyl. But I figure perhaps something that wasn't overly expensive would be a nice addition to my house. I'd have to fall in love with vinyl to get a turntable more expensive than that.

I find your first paragraph to be quite harsh. Companies like Apple and Amazon are moving to high res trying to grow market share and are marketing it to the mainstream (Amazon markets their higher resolution tracks as HD and Ultra HD). A video pointing out why this may be futile seems like a legitimate topic for someone in the space to cover.

And to be clear, I have a decent collection of both DVD-Audio and SACD discs. I am also streaming higher res audio. So I’m not against the idea of it.

I'm against streaming high rez audio for other reasons than the quality. I have plenty of music on my computer, and want to focus on physical disks for some stuff, especially jazz and classical. But only if the discs have the highest possible recordings.

I did mention that I didn't keep up with the current state of streaming high rez audio. I do know that Tidal, when it was first introduced, was only streaming CD quality as high rez. But that was several years ago.

My harshness was focused mainly at the guy that posted the Youtube video saying that high rez music was dead.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

By and large, the hi res audio market has shifted to online delivery, which makes the economics of a niche product more workable. If you want hi res audio as a purchase rather than subscription, the best bet is to look to sites like HD Tracks. The declines in physical media sales along with the general public’s apathy towards high res audio makes physical releases very difficult to justify financially, but those expenses are manageable without having to manufacture a physical disc and speciality players.

 

[jcroy]

I'd be interested in physical disks. And perhaps someday I'll get a decent turntable. (Something under a $1000, but prefer the $500 to $750 range) and start collecting vinyl. For a long time I was against vinyl, and there are arguments for and against vinyl. But I figure perhaps something that wasn't overly expensive would be a nice addition to my house. I'd have to fall in love with vinyl to get a turntable more expensive than that.

I'm pretty much done with vinyl. Back in the day, I was once a hardcore vinyl collector in the days when my particular musical genre tastes were not released on cd at the time (circa mid->late 1980s).

Come 1990 by the time I stopped buying a lot of music, I came to the realization I hardly listened to any of my vinyl collection. Even today, I hardly ever listen to most albums more than once or twice.

Kinda of a waste buying so many cds, vinyl, cassettes, etc ... which ended up collecting dust for over 25+ years.

 

[cinemel1]

Breaking News - Water is wet.

HD audio has never been a mainstream product. So, it's genuinely idiotic to even go to the trouble of creating a video claiming it's dead for the mainstream. It is and has always been dead for the mainstream.

I actually own quite a bit of HD music, and I have several enthusiast friends who do as well. I have a decent collection of SACDs and many downloads purchased from HDTracks. I am a member of the market for HD music, and we definitely exist. Some SACDs I have are a little more spotty regarding catalog titles, but the recordings that were originally done well and recorded in actual high res digital, like the DSD stuff from Telarc, are stellar.

There is a lot more good catalog stuff on HDTracks, because producers seem to have gotten a lot better at converting older analog stuff to HD. I can say that I'm floored by several catalog titles from the 70s I've gotten. Some in particular that are stellar are Supertramp's Crime of the Century, Jethro Tull's Aqualung, and Chicago Transit Authority.

Where it really shines is in 21st Century recordings that bring all the elements together. Everything has to be done exceptionally well. In particular, several classical recordings by Chandos I have gotten are almost transcendent. Simply put, they are just amazing.

I have had Oppo players, currently the 203, and they play SACD’s as well as DVD-Audio. I have been purchasing a few of the SACD versions of quadraphonic releases of the pop music (Billy Joel) and the Charles Gerhardt film music albums, as well as the Columbia original cast albums of Company and A Little Night Music. The Eagles Farewell concert is also spectacular. They all sound quite good and use the rear channels sometlimes discretely and others for ambient sound.

 

[Sam Posten]

Got it. You guys want to stick your heads in the sand and pretend nothing has changed and nothing will ever change and if you hope really really hard a Hi Rez disk format will magically appear despite the economics of that being impossible as streaming services boom. So yes, for you Hi Rez and spatial audio are dead.

 

[Pupp]

Got it. You guys want to stick your heads in the sand and pretend nothing has changed and nothing will ever change and if you hope really really hard a Hi Rez disk format will magically appear despite the economics of that being impossible as streaming services boom. So yes, for you Hi Rez and spatial audio are dead.

I'm not sure who your directing that post to.
I was under the impression that 24/192 was top of the line. I think Amazon sells a blu-ray audio album with Beethoven's 9 symphanies, and that takes 2 discs. That's a lot of data, considering most blu-rays are done with at least double layer. So that's something between 50 and 100GB of data. Even at a single layer, we're still talking about tens of gigabytes of data.

 

[ScottHM]

High fidelity audio, blu-ray audio (24bit, 192 khz,) really needs very good speakers or headphones for a person to really get something out of that.

Most music recordings are produced to sound good in a car or on earbuds, and 24bit, 192khz is way overkill for that. Hi-rez audio formats primarily benefit recordings of music most people don't want to listen to.

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[Pupp]

Most music recordings are produced to sound good in a car or on earbuds, and 24bit, 192khz is way overkill for that. Hi-rez audio formats primarily benefit recordings of music most people don't want to listen to.

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I think most people on this thread would agree with that.
This thread is mostly for snobbish people that actually want to invest time and money in equipment worthy of listening to overkill quality music, usually at thier house.

Hypothetically, if I spent $10,000 on a car audio system, which I would never do, I'd still only be playing mid quality mp3 tracks on it.

I've never bought car audio. lol.

 

[Sam Posten]

You should try it. Modern cars have factory stereos that bump.

 

[Pupp]

You should try it. Modern cars have factory stereos that bump.

Bump?

In the car, I just use music in the background. Only occasionally do I turn it up to focus on a particular song. I have an older car, and music, to a degree, but not too much, competes with road noise. Certainly compared to a much newer car.

 

[Pupp]

In any event I don't want the thread to veer too much into a different subject.

 

[jcroy]

Bump?

In the car, I just use music in the background. Only occasionally do I turn it up to focus on a particular song. I have an older car, and music, to a degree, but not too much, competes with road noise. Certainly compared to a much newer car.

When I'm driving, I rarely turn on the radio/stereo.

The times I do turn it on, I always tune it to a station that plays music I have no familiarity with.

In practice I've found that playing music I am familiar with, is very distracting to me while driving. But if I don't know the music, I've found it blends into the background noise and is not distracting for me.

 

[jcroy]

This thread is mostly for snobbish people that actually want to invest time and money in equipment worthy of listening to overkill quality music, usually at thier house.

When it comes to a home stereo, I've found the biggest bang for the buck was a separate subwoofer if you have a lot of titles with a lot of low and/or heavy sounding bass.

A better cd player and/or higher resolution sources, wasn't as noticable for 24-track multitrack recordings which were not mixed very well and/or were heavily brickwalled.

 

[TJPC]

I once spent hours of my time, listening to music that interested me, with my full attention. This was in the days when I lived by myself and basically had an apartment with a wonderful expensive system and one chair.

Life — career, marriage and family intervened. Now, many years later, since my brain has been scrambled by the instant gratification of the internet, I can’t get my mind to focus on anything over 2 minutes without wandering out the window, or falling asleep, and I can’t believe I once sat and listened to an entire symphony.