🔊 Audio About High Resolution Audio

Rudy

¡Que siga la fiesta!
Staff member
Site Admin
With new recordings and newly issued remasters being released in high-res formats, I felt it was time to offer a brief primer in what exactly high resolution audio is. I had considered doing my own article, but Technics has done a great job describing the basics: What Is High-Resolution Audio. (A link at the bottom of their page will lead you through the remaining articles.) While the Technics site obviously lists only their own products, I can create a list of players, and computer software, capable of playing these back, in a future article here.

Read the whole post at A&M Corner...
 
Regarding high resolution audio, I've always been a fan of high resolution audio. However, the big caveat is that a poorly mastered/remastered high resolution audio track to me will always sound worse than a well-mastered (dynamic) CD-quality track from the 1980s. So, imho, I still prefer the CD releases from the mid-1980s over their high-resolution counterparts. A good case in point would be Paul Simon's 1986 Graceland CD from Warner Bros. (very nice dynamic range) vs. the high-resolution remaster from 2011 (which is peak limited to death—horrendously poor dynamic range).
 
Yeah, the mastering is the catch. Yet since I buy very few pop/rock releases, I rarely encounter a high-res remaster that is badly limited. (And even there, if I get something from Analogue Productions or Mobile Fidelity, the mastering is usually pretty good.) Most new albums today are available in high-res downloads, so if I bought anything that would be in rock/pop/etc., the CD, hi-res and vinyl likely all sound the same (and are often "slammed").

Short version--you can't polish a turd. 😁

One of the worst I've ever heard was Nirvana's Nevermind. I was hoping for the best, but the high-res version from Universal had all the life sucked out of it from having such heavy limiting on it. The original CD is still punchy. Even on the original, where some tracks were limited during production, they still had a certain clarity to them. The remaster killed that, and they even used the same mastering to make their own vinyl pressings that sounded identically bad. (The go-to version is apparently the ORG pressing--Original Recordings Group--on vinyl, catalog number ORG 032.)

My last several were a few Horace Silver remasters on Blue Note, three tracks by The Mavericks (the Edicion Especial of En Espanol), the latest Dr. Lonnie Smith album, and a couple others that slipped my mind. The Mavericks' is a bit hot, but I've heard a lot worse. All the others sound fine.
 
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