“The high-resolution music, that you purchase from us is guaranteed native (true original) 24bit HighResAudio Studio Master material. We have signed with all music labels, artists and artist-agencies contracts to assure exactly that. We do not accept nor offer up-sampled or converted material. Our quality-control checks and evaluates each album with a professional studio software! You will receive and buy only true original 24bit HighResAudio ‘Studio Master’ files from us.”<\/p>\n
“The albums sold by Qobuz in ‘Qobuz Studio Master’ quality are supplied to us directly by the labels. They are not re-encoded from SACDs and as such we guarantee their pedigree. We refuse to accept suspect offerings simply to enlarge our offering.”<\/p>\n
What good is a guarantee? Obviously, websites can state anything they want about the quality of the tracks offered on their respective sites. Here’s what I would say about the tracks that are available on iTrax.com, if I had a guarantee.<\/p>\n
“The iTrax high-resolution audio website sells only real HD-Audio files. What is a Real HD-Audio recording? One that originated at the time of the session in real high-resolution…not analog tape, not direct to disc, and not standard resolution 44.1 kHz\/16 bits PCM digital samples (those are standard resolution). Every track on the site was actually recorded using equipment running at 96 kHz\/24-bits (there are some 88.2 kHz projects) or DSD 64 at 2.8224 MHz \/ 1-bit, which were converted to PCM at 96 kHz\/24-bits.”<\/p>\n
It sounds like everyone is on the same page, right? Well, not really. Is there any wiggle room in the statement from HighResAudio? In fact, there is. I have seen the licenses that the major labels offer to sites like HDtracks and others. I seriously thought about entering that business but the price was simply too high. The mastering engineers at the labels are simply doing transfers of the easiest available master. Sometimes that a digital master that has already been converted to digital and sometimes it’s a master that was intended for a vinyl LP release. Usually, it’s the most convenient master without any assurance that it’s the best master. I know this because I am friends with a lot of the mastering people that work doing this type of work. They’re not working with the right masters a lot of the time.<\/p>\n
And just because the original master was transferred from an analog master doesn’t mean that there is 24-bits of dynamic range in the recording. As we’ve seen, recordings that eclipse 10-12 bits of dynamic range are very rare. So why would anyone that’s offering older, standard definition recording brag about them being bona fide<\/em> 24-bit tracks? <\/p>\n It’s a feel good marketing plan. There is no benefit to music lovers or audiophiles to acquiring 24-bit recordings, if the masters can be completely captured using fewer bits. On the other hand, there is great benefit to having 24-bits when you’re recording a new master! You can push the signal level higher to take advantage of the additional dynamic range while the musicians are playing. The added “headroom” means that you can worry a little less about going into distortion. You capture excessive levels of dynamic range and then you can deliver less.<\/p>\n As for Qobuz, I got wise to their “it’s not our fault” mentality many months ago when I download a couple of sample files at 192 kHz…neither of which were native 192 kHz recordings. They were both, in fact, upconversions from a DSD master and an analog tape. So if the licensing company does the upconversion or monkeys around with the sound, then the guarantee still stands. A clever approach that takes Qobuz off the hook. They emailed me calling my analysis and revelations “malicious”. I would call their guarantee meaningless\u2026it means nothing. In fact, most guarantees are.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “The high-resolution music, that you purchase from us is guaranteed native (true original) 24bit HighResAudio Studio Master material. We have<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3488,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","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":[657,50,40,757,172,57,242,725,17,1032,70,640,26,639,651,42,298,251,645,1035,638,637,227,643,169,276,436,347,659,673,658,660],"class_list":["post-3487","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-dr_aixs_posts","tag-advanced-resolution","tag-aix-records","tag-analog-vs-digital","tag-audio-quality-guarantee","tag-audio-resolution","tag-audio-specifications","tag-audiophile-mastering","tag-blu-ray-discs","tag-dsd","tag-dvd_audio","tag-hd-downloads","tag-hd-music","tag-hd-audio","tag-hi-res-audio","tag-hi-res-audio-logo","tag-high-resolution-audio","tag-high-res-music","tag-high-resolution","tag-high-resolution-audio-experience","tag-highresaudio","tag-hires-audio","tag-hires-music","tag-hra","tag-hra-listening-experience","tag-mark-waldrep","tag-mastering","tag-qobuz-2","tag-spectragram","tag-uhd-audio","tag-ultra-hd","tag-ultra-hd-audio","tag-ultra-high-definition-audio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3487","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=3487"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3487\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3489,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3487\/revisions\/3489"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3487"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3487"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3487"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}