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In Reply to: RE: Where to go to get the best selection of true hi-res (not up-res'd) music? posted by tonyptony on June 01, 2012 at 16:19:45
. . . I like The Classical Shop - even though they seem to throttle their download speeds (in comparison to other download sites), thus making the download times awfully long. Also, I've used (and recommend) the Linn Records site - mainly for the superbly engineered recordings on the German Acousence label (with excellent performances by orchestras you've never heard of!). Also eClassical has been good - and I got some good advice here from Russell as to how to make my download experience on that site more successful. Even HD Tracks has been OK for me most of the time - as long as you really know what it is you're downloading! ;-)
Follow Ups:
Thanks Chris. The part about HD Tracks is what has me hesitant. I wish they would indicate whether the various material was merely up-res'd or truly recorded or redigitized in hi-res. They have so much material that it makes it a great site for a very wide range of music.
Are there any tips for figuring out what you're looking at on HD Tracks?
My method for figuring out what's really there on HD Tracks is not very good - it's intuition based! I figure with the items such as the Reference Recordings, they likely came from the data discs which Reference was selling for awhile, so there's a good chance they're legit. All my Reference downloads from HD Tracks have been fine. OTOH, I wonder with the Mercury downloads if they simply took the corresponding SACD and converted it to PCM for the download - and I'm not willing to chance paying for a download to find out. (And in any case, I have all the Mercury CD's and SACD's I wanted.) I've also downloaded a couple of the 24/96 Decca Legends (Ansermet Debussy and Katchen doing the Liszt Concertos, etc) - they also seem to be legit. OTOH, I just downloaded the new "24/96" Decca recital by pianist Benjamin Grosvenor, which didn't seem to have anything over 15KHz, but it still could be 24 bits, so it still might be legitimate, even though the highs don't extend that far up.
Overall, I've been mostly satisfied with HD Tracks, but as your original post implies, it's sometimes a bit of a crap shoot downloading from them.
Quotes like these
"We don't like up-sampling; we don't allow it."
"We take native 96/24 or 88/24 and test it."
"In the case of a digital recording, we want the digital master. In the case of an analog recording, we specify how it should be transferred."
I can read these a couple of different ways. The hopeful me interprets these statements as meaning high res material on HD Tracks is truly high res. The jaundiced me looks at the FFT plots from some of the material downloaded from HD Tracks (as posted on sites like computeraudiophile) and wonders.
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