{"id":4414,"date":"2015-04-08T17:59:54","date_gmt":"2015-04-09T00:59:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/?p=4414"},"modified":"2015-04-08T17:59:54","modified_gmt":"2015-04-09T00:59:54","slug":"tom-petty-catalog-gets-the-hi-res-treatment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/?p=4414","title":{"rendered":"Tom Petty Catalog Gets the Hi-Res Treatment"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The email shouts, &#8220;The Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers catalog is now available in Hi-Res digital formats!&#8221; I saw the announcement this morning and a couple of people forwarded the press release and links to the video. It&#8217;s actually a great headline because it&#8217;s true. Tom Petty&#8217;s albums, which decidedly standard resolution having been recorded on analog tape, have been remastered and are being sold in high-resolution digital formats. I can appreciate that they didn&#8217;t say that these new masters are real high-resolution audio\u2026but they pitch them as such. <\/p>\n<p>The YouTube video is pretty interesting&#8230;very casual and hip. It&#8217;s only a couple of minutes long but nicely done&#8230;if somewhat challenged in the accuracy department.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"600\" height=\"338\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Hl_MQwc4qOE?feature=player_detailpage\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Video 1 &#8211; Tom Petty talking about high-resolution audio and the availability of his back catalog in &#8220;high-res&#8221; on HDtracks.<\/p>\n<p>I have to admit to being a die hard Tom Petty fan. His music, his guitar focused productions, his singing, and his dedication to good sound works for me. But I had to pause for a minute when I heard Tom rave about high-resolution audio. Does he really know what he&#8217;s talking about? His opening statement, &#8220;Hi-res is actually a great thing. Many people haven&#8217;t discovered it yet. And, maybe you don&#8217;t understand it but you will understand it when you listen to it. It&#8217;s many, many times the resolution of any MP3 or a CD. You really can&#8217;t miss it. If you turn it on, it&#8217;s going to change everything for you musically,&#8221; is just a bunch of the same tried and false nonsense about high-resolution being dramatically different than what we&#8217;ve been used to in the past.<\/p>\n<p>Hold on a second. Let&#8217;s stop and take a look at the Tom Petty catalog. He&#8217;s written and released some really classic rock &#8216;n roll records including some very iconic hits. But they were recorded on analog tape, mixed through an analog console (the desk behind him in the video is a Neve, I believe), and eventually mastered to vinyl LPs. The digital versions on CD came later. And they were mastered to the standards of the time&#8230;pretty loud.<\/p>\n<p>Now he wants us to revisit and repurchase the same albums again. Only this time, he claims the mastering engineers have lightened up on the compression and left some dynamics on the recordings. You can hear things in the new high-resolution versions that may require you to turn the volume up on your system. &#8220;You&#8217;ll actually hear what we hear in the studio sitting behind the console, which would make me very happy.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>What he&#8217;s really talking about are new masters that have had less compression applied&#8230;probably a touch more bass and a tweak to the high frequencies. These versions will undoubtedly sound terrific and be richer and more dynamic than the original versions. But they are not high-resolution. They are &#8220;Master Quality&#8221; and reflect the best versions that we will likely ever have of Tom&#8217;s classics&#8230;but unless he recorded them using high-resolution equipment and produced them with the intent to keep the fidelity as high as possible, the recordings will never be high-resolution. His speech sounds like he was told what to say by the marketing people behind the project.<\/p>\n<p>To be continued tomorrow&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The email shouts, &#8220;The Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers catalog is now available in Hi-Res digital formats!&#8221; I saw the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4418,"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":[657,50,40,172,57,1032,70,640,26,42,298,251,645,638,637,227,643,169,150,347,27,786,659,658,660,661],"class_list":["post-4414","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-resolution","tag-audio-specifications","tag-dvd_audio","tag-hd-downloads","tag-hd-music","tag-hd-audio","tag-high-resolution-audio","tag-high-res-music","tag-high-resolution","tag-high-resolution-audio-experience","tag-hires-audio","tag-hires-music","tag-hra","tag-hra-listening-experience","tag-mark-waldrep","tag-pcm","tag-spectragram","tag-spectragraphs","tag-tom-petty","tag-uhd-audio","tag-ultra-hd-audio","tag-ultra-high-definition-audio","tag-ultra-high-resolution-audio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4414","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=4414"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4414\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4419,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4414\/revisions\/4419"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.realhd-audio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}