I so far have a handful of higher-than-CD quality tracks. (Random chance by downloading an album from bandcamp; had not even known, they had this in the offering.)
I’ll give this a try, when I have some time; especially since you also mention an interesting mix of music.
Question: Any concerns to encode the WAV files as FLAC or ALAC? Just found out, that iTunes also supports the HiRes files, also when compressing them to ALAC. (Not, that there could be a difference on the inbuilt speakers… and Airplay cannot transmit this either, AFAIK.)
But it would nicely save some space on copying/storing the music.
Having carried out Mark Waldrep’s test I can honestly say I found it extremely difficult to differentiate between the 20off Red Book CD and Hi-Res files and clearly the large majority of the 460+ people did as well.
I’m not convinced there is a great benefit in MQA or whatever.
MQA is something different, a data compression technique that I understand is lossy, and upon reconstruction artifacts can be produced that may be detectable by some people.
As for high resolution and 16/44 files, as I see it, assuming the 16/44 are simply downsampled from the former and not different mastering, any audible difference is likely to depend on the information as recorded - which is where the subject of this thread comes in. However, in terms of dynamically uncompressed music, the 96dB range of 16 bit should be able to cover all except the most extreme dynamic ranges, pppp and its decay to fffff in a single recording, a range that I think is extremely rare to find in any single musical performances. The question is whether nevertheless a higher resolution version reveals any genuine difference in sound.
I have downloaded the referenced sampler to have a listen when I have time (though not sure how many of the tracks that will be as I gather some are jazz or other styles I can’t stand). But for assessment of hi res I think it is hard to beat the 2L samples, all from high quality recordings (unlike the Mark Waldrep material, some of which were poor recordings) made at the highest resolution, simply downsampled to the various ones offered. To avoid possible bias, some means of blind playing is of course desirable.
I have a pretty good system although the 63year old ears it is playing too are probably not at the same level!!
I’ll download these files and give them a listen.
We live out in the sticks and use ee mobile via an external aerial and only have 100Gb a month. Woke up yesterday morning to discover we had used it all up with a week to go, put on another 20Gb, this will eat some 793.3Mb in to it…
Yes its a huge file, it took best part of 30 mins on my 75mb/s service & I can’t understand why.
Plus the metadata is real rubbish, OK it may be ‘just’ a sampler, but as its also a sampler of MA Recordings I will not be so keen on using them in future
My service is without doubt what it’s advertised at, the line tests as 73 to 74mb/s & in room wireless is >500mb/s.
I see some tracks are abnormally large, greater than 300,000KB in WAV, but if converted to FLAC they’re less than 50,000KB, something’s not right.
Whatever, as a sample offering its not shown up anything new, I’ll not be looking for MA in the future
Having transferred the files to my NAS yesterday my first listen yesterday evening was considerably underwhelming BUT the whole system had been powered down and not warmed up.
Listening this evening the tracks do sound a whole lot better even though not my particular taste in genre. I like the dynamics.
