It’s almost impossible to put aside one’s own self interest when preparing a sales piece or writing a few paragraphs for your website’s “About Us” page and avoid hyperbole and marketing spin. I recognize that. I’m guilty of it myself. You choose to say things that are true but don’t really tell the whole story. It’s like the difference between a news item as produced by the network news and the in depth reporting that you get from the PBS New Hour (although my recent experience with NPR has shaken my confidence in their ability to get the whole story or even to get it right…the single line that they used from my interview about high-resolution audio and Blue Coast Records seemed to infer that I support Cookie Marenco’s recording chain…I don’t). As someone that has been typing 500-1000 words everyday about the world of high-end music, I get it.<\/p>\n
So I thought I would look around on the web this morning and check in on some site and see how much spin is happening. MY first stop was HDTracks. They are the 800-pound gorilla in the “high-resolution” download world. David Chesky and I started our respective download sites at about the same time. I remember talking to him about including some of his recordings on iTrax.com. He told me that he was preparing his own high-resolution digital music site.<\/p>\n
So along comes iTrax.com in the fall of 2007 and a few months later HDTracks. I focused exclusively on real HD-Audio tracks. The only tracks that you will find on my site are ones that were actually recorded at the time the musicians were in the studio or on a stage using high-resolution capable equipment. HDTracks did licensing deals with Warner Music Group, EMI, Atlantic and many other labels. It didn’t seem to matter to HDTracks whether the tracks were originally standard definition tracks or not. Once they were put out as 96 kHz or 192 kHz files…they were magically “HD Tracks”.<\/p>\n
Here are a couple of lines from the “About HDTracks” page on their site:<\/p>\n
“HDtracks files will put you in the recording studio with the artists. You will hear exactly what the artists and engineer hear in the studio.” <\/p>\n
The statement is wishful thinking. You might ask which studio are you going to be in with the artists? The mixing studio where the mixing engineer, artist and producer crafted the master mixes? No. The mastering studio where the engineer created the CD master (the artist is usually not present at this session)? No. How about the transfer station where the EQ’d master (which was prepared for a vinyl LP) has been narrowed to mono below a certain frequency and bumped up in the high frequency range to make the record brighter (the usual path for EQ’d masters)? Yep…that’s what you get many times.<\/p>\n
To Be Continued\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s almost impossible to put aside one’s own self interest when preparing a sales piece or writing a few paragraphs<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1645,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[289,251,169],"class_list":["post-1641","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dr_aixs_posts","tag-hdtracks","tag-high-resolution","tag-mark-waldrep"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1641"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1646,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641\/revisions\/1646"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1645"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}