{"id":1628,"date":"2023-03-05T23:25:12","date_gmt":"2023-03-06T07:25:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/?p=1628"},"modified":"2023-03-31T01:08:51","modified_gmt":"2023-03-31T08:08:51","slug":"buying-music-in-high-resolution-audio-formats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/2023\/03\/buying-music-in-high-resolution-audio-formats\/","title":{"rendered":"buying music in high-resolution audio formats"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Joni Mitchell&#8217;s <em>Blue<\/em> on vinyl has a distortion at times behind her voice and piano. Time to buy a digital track and see if it&#8217;s still there. What the heck, go big and get the 192 kHZ 24-bit FLAC high-res audio. <a href=\"https:\/\/whatnerd.com\/best-sites-buy-lossless-hi-res-music\/\">whatNerd has a list<\/a>, &#8220;The 7 Best Sites to Buy Lossless and Hi-Res Music&#8221;:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/bandcamp.com\/\">Bandcamp<\/a>: it&#8217;s a great resource to directly buy music from new musicians without going through a label, but Ms. Mitchell isn&#8217;t on it.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Acoustic Sounds. &#8220;alas we&#8217;ve reached the decision to cease operating our Acoustic Sounds Super HiRez digital downloads service&#8221;.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.prostudiomasters.com\/\">ProStudioMasters<\/a>: album available for $25.99 released May 28, 2013<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.nativedsd.com\/\">NativeDSD<\/a>: not available. <a href=\"\/blog\/2012\/04\/audio-dsd-digital-nirvana-approaches\/\" data-type=\"URL\" data-id=\"\/blog\/2012\/04\/audio-dsd-digital-nirvana-approaches\/\">I&#8217;ve blogged<\/a> that DSD is supposedly an awesome format for a digital master, and some obsessive Roon users re-encode all their music to DSD 512 before sending the bits to their music player, but it seems mostly classical tracks are available to buy in DSD.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.hdtracks.com\/\">HDtracks<\/a>: album available for $26.48<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/us.7digital.com\">7digital<\/a>: it only has her later Geffen releases, and only in 16-bit 44 kHz FLAC format.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.highresaudio.com\/en\">HIGHRESAUDIO<\/a>: seems to be a UK site, only has <em>The Reprise Albums<\/em> boxed set and <em>Blue<\/em> outtakes, unclear what formats it offers but has a badge for the dubious proprietary MQA format, and &#8220;due to territorial constraints and also different releases dates in each country you currently can`t purchase this album.&#8221;<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.qobuz.com\">Qobuz<\/a> (the high-res streamingit across service also offers a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qobuz.com\/us-en\/shop\">store<\/a> for downloads): album for only $22.09 , even cheaper at lower resolutions. The big plus is you can buy individual tracks.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So Qobuz it is, $5.18 for &#8220;All I Want&#8221; and &#8220;My Old Man.&#8221; This may seem like a lot, but I used to pay more for 45 RPM singles in today&#8217;s money (the $1 that a single cost in 1970 is now worth about $7!). Alas Qobuz has a $0.52 fee for paying with PayPal. The two songs are 70 MB each, about 10 times bigger than a quality MP3 encoding. (I remember the breakthrough when Macromedia was able to fit a song onto a floppy disk with MP3 compression.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Sounds good&#8230;<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">OK, get the Roon server audio player working again on my Fedora laptop. It&#8217;s a great player for your digital audio files, but Roon&#8217;s default setup installs it as the <code>root<\/code> user\ud83d\ude28! Roon expect you to install it on dedicated hardware, while I&#8217;m running it on my laptop so <a href=\"https:\/\/community.roonlabs.com\/t\/installing-roon-server-on-fedora-linux-not-as-root\/236339\">I fiddled around<\/a> to install as a separate <code>roon<\/code> user with limited rights. Tell Roon to play the digital audio files through my <a href=\"https:\/\/theaudiophileman.com\/pecanpi-dac-streamer-review-orchard-audio\/\">Orchard PecanPi streamer<\/a>, toggle my monstrous VTL tube power amps to their balanced XLR inputs and listen!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/images\/audio\/orchard_pecanpi_streamer_with_vtl_amp.jpg\" alt=\"Ethernet plugged into Orchard PecanPi streamer plugged into VTL power amp plugged into Magnepan 3.6 speakers.\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">Tiny digital \u2192 huge analog<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">There&#8217;s still a bit of soft crackling-but-not-like cellophane behind her voice \ud83d\ude22, though much less behind the piano. What&#8217;s going on? I&#8217;ve heard this noise on a friend&#8217;s high-end stereo too. Is this intermodulation distortion in audio systems or is it inherent in the recording? Otherwise the digital soundstage feels wider: there&#8217;s none of the overlap of the left and right channels that you get when two angled walls are pushing a diamond on a thin cantilever from side-to-side in a piece of vinyl. The details are clearer than my vinyl, but it doesn&#8217;t have that vinyl warmth&#8230; which might just be the rolled-off treble and overlapping stereo channels. Who knows. I just want songs I love to sound amazing without worrying about the details.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Own or stream?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I really should upgrade to Qobuz from YouTube Music (formerly <s>Google Play Music<\/s> YouTube <s>Gold<\/s> <s>Red<\/s> <s>Premium<\/s>) so I can listen to music in hi-res audio without buying the track, and get a discount if I do buy it; and Qobuz integrates with the Roon audio player. Especially now that YouTube family membership is $23 a month. But then I read comments on YouTube videos about music from all the people complaining about incessant ads. By paying I never see any ads, even on a Roku TV streamer where I can&#8217;t run the great <a href=\"https:\/\/addons.mozilla.org\/en-US\/firefox\/addon\/ublock-origin\/\">uBlock Origin<\/a> ad-blocker for Firefox.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<h2 class=\"wp-block-heading\">Digital taste test<\/h2>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I should buy the MP3s of the songs and do a blind test to see if my aging ears can tell the difference. But there are confounding factors: the higher-res audio files might be mastered a fraction of a dB higher because undetectably louder always sounds better (the Beatles on USB did this with the FLAC versions), and it&#8217;s unclear if the high-res <em>Blue<\/em> files are from the remastered album or the original.<\/p>\n\n\n<div class=\"wp-block-image\">\n<figure class=\"aligncenter size-large is-resized\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/images\/music\/beatles_usb_aluminum_apple.jpg\" alt=\"The aluminum &quot;The Beatles USB&quot; apple with the USB flash drive removed.\" width=\"500\" height=\"333\"\/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\">The high-res files on this object d&#8217;art were made louder so they sound &#8220;better&#8221;<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Joni Mitchell&#8217;s Blue on vinyl has a distortion at times behind her voice and piano. Time to buy a digital track and see if it&#8217;s still there. What the heck, go big and get the 192 kHZ 24-bit FLAC high-res &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/2023\/03\/buying-music-in-high-resolution-audio-formats\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-music","category-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1628"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1684,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1628\/revisions\/1684"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}