Many of the original Tijuana Brass master tapes aren't all that "audiophile" anyway. Each album has its own idiosyncrasies, like LONELY BULL having some "made-up" stereo added to mono recordings, VOLUME 2 being too bright, SOUTH OF THE BORDER (probably one of the best) was extra heavy in the bass, WHAT NOW MY LOVE had its two-different-stereo-mixes problems, SRO has some awful sonics on "Our Day Will Come", THE BRASS ARE COMIN' with its CSG problems.
Compounding all of that are the age of the master tapes and the fact that some are deteriorating over time. We've all lamented the state of "Tijuana Taxi" and "Spanish Flea" with their worn spots in the recent rounds of remasters. Unfortunately "The Sea Is My Soil" also seems to have some rough spots in it on the files from iTunes.
So with the TjB recordings, I don't know that upper-end bit rates are going to make all that much difference anyway. I'm pretty happy with the way that the majority of them sound on the three download-only albums, and I downloaded them at the time the bit-rate was even lower.
Like Mike, most of my listening tends to be in a car or when I'm traveling, with lots of ambient noise all around. When I listen at home, particularly on the "good" headphones, that's when I hear all of the anomalies showing up.
Harry
Compounding all of that are the age of the master tapes and the fact that some are deteriorating over time. We've all lamented the state of "Tijuana Taxi" and "Spanish Flea" with their worn spots in the recent rounds of remasters. Unfortunately "The Sea Is My Soil" also seems to have some rough spots in it on the files from iTunes.
So with the TjB recordings, I don't know that upper-end bit rates are going to make all that much difference anyway. I'm pretty happy with the way that the majority of them sound on the three download-only albums, and I downloaded them at the time the bit-rate was even lower.
Like Mike, most of my listening tends to be in a car or when I'm traveling, with lots of ambient noise all around. When I listen at home, particularly on the "good" headphones, that's when I hear all of the anomalies showing up.
Harry