The Naim nDAC will play 32/352 just fine. The “best of your knowledge” ain’t up to scratch 
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anyone wanting to experience Air Studios and who has a PlaystationVR (1); there is a free demo of an audio recording on the Playstation store.
using the 3D audio tracking tech it is one of the more amazing audio/visual experiences that tech provides, and being ‘free’ worth experiencing (if you have the means).
seei that space; being able to look at the control room from the musicians perspective (and all around the room)… certainly gives a sense of ‘what it is all about’.
edit: posts on either side of mine; DXD?
I’ve no horse in this race; I use a chifi ladder DAC (and LOVE it!), so ‘no idea’!
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You beat me to it!
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It’s a ‘joke-with-a-bit-of-truth’ - hence the emoji…
A photo of the control room looking the other way across the desk would be helpful. I don’t know what Air have, but in general there will be two or three pairs of mid and/or nearfield monitors, as well as something with constrained bandwidth (a grot box… ) to check the mix for small-speaker/radio compatibility, and maybe for checking mono compatibility too. They all have their uses, and engineers their preferences. If you are doing it all day every day, the mains are likely too loud but - as I might have mentioned - it depends!
If you are familiar with the main monitors in the control room, all good; if not, you might be better off using nearfields - or headphones…
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Depending on your device and app these remain available. Qobuz and Roon make booklets available via their apps and it works pretty well.
Also worth noting that the “inner sleeve” is a relatively modern invention. From the late 1960s to around 1990 most albums (I think it was estimated at around 75% by 1 source) came with plain white inner sleeves. CD changed that but CD booklets are often unreadable. Being able to magnify them on an app such as the Innuos Sense is one of the joys.
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They do have volume controls in studios!
Not sure if that was a reference to engineers or to home listeners? Engineers working in professional studios of course will be - and for myself, my speakers are not uncommonly found as main monitors in studios…
Blind tests?
Engineers. You can learn the ‘sound’ of the (control) room and monitors but, if it’s an unfamiliar space, you may have unexpected issues. Nearfields or headphones help. And as I’m sure you know, studio monitors can be ruthlessly revealing of a bad mix… 
Edit - the Lyndhurst Hall control room looks to have soffit mounted main monitors above the window; most photos I can find don’t show nearfields, but AIR do list an interesting selection in their ‘toy cupboard’… !
My take on digital recordings is that obviously the mastering is all important. Providing this is done at 24 bit depth and with a sampling rate of at least 44.1khz (or preferably 88.2khz?) then the master should sound great. This is only the main master of course and what follows is where we can lose out on sound quality.
Further masters will be created for radio, lower quality streaming etc. Also, there may be 24/44.1 or greater versions ‘upsampled’ from poor quality sources by unscrupulous sellers.
How can we be sure that we are purchasing an album based on the original master? Is there one seller where all of the products are guaranteed? I doubt it very much!
I would love to hear recommendations from you good people as to which sellers you trust or have positive experience with. Also, why not name and shame any unscrupulous ones.
My best experience so far is with Sound Liaison but their catalogue is very limited for obvious reasons.
I don’t actually recall for certain if blind -I think it was, but it was a few years ago and I don’t remember how I achieved it as unlike testing gear I don’t think I engaged my son. I must still have the files, so as my amp and speakers have changed since then, I should have another listen some time.
Very interesting and thanks for sharing.
It’s great to have such a humble knowledgable person on this forum.
Happy New Year!
.sjb
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That’s an excellent analogy.
But it does raise the question:
What are the SQ differences between audio recordings that are made with and without digital technology, and how important is the digitisation process in determining the different sound quality versus other differences between the two recording and playback processes that are being compared?
One related point that springs to mind is that if the person judging the sound quality of two recordings has heard that music being recorded live by being in the room with the musicians, the listener is in a privileged position in some senses, but she is also more biased than other people in some senses.
I once played some music to one of my daughters when she was about nine years old, and I said I thought the music sounded very close to what I thought the sound of the original music as played by the musicians at the concert would have been.
She said, ‘Oh, it sounds much better than that!’
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Yes, and digitisation is just one of these factors.
Unless you are talking about recording an ensemble of or a sole acoustic instruments… then most musicians now use amplified and mixed instrumentation from the get go. Even the famous early digital acoustic orchestral recordings by Jack Renner and Robert Woods (Telarc Records International) had some processing using the famous three microphone approach to allow the audio to sound musical and vibrant… using Dr Stocham’s Soundstream digital recorder at 16 bits / 50 kHz sample rate in the late 70s, in a way the then complete analogue chain recordings couldn’t capture, and light years ahead in terms of musicality of the digital recording technology at that time… that probably was responsible for creating the stigma of digital recordings within many audiophile circles for the years that followed.
So wind the clock forward to our time now and I was with a reasonably successful acoustic folk band at one of their gigs prior to Christmas, and I was impressed at the attention to detail from the band itself at setup, sound check and rehearsal on microphone quality and placement, eq, compression, mix levels, reverb and amplification /speakers quality for the live gig… and they had no engineer… and they certainly were not what you would call ‘technical’, but knew how the audio had to be processed for it to convey the musicality and emotion that they as musicians wanted to express.
I think perhaps many forget how much electronic and digital processing is applied to the music audio signal when you hear it… whether streamed, CD, vinyl or live… as simply otherwise the resultant music may well sound dull, jumbled and simply not musical.
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One other aspect of SQ is the dynamic range of the recording after any normalisation is applied. On many of my cd rips (I used dbpoweramp), I can see a dr number against the album details in Roon. There is also a graphical representation of the DR in the progress bar at the bottom.
I do not have the same from purchased files - why is this?
It very much depends on the distribution master - sometimes normalisation is used and sometimes it doesn’t - when using 16 bits I guess the tendency is try and normalise the bit values - which of course can lead to a higher actual value for a tiny fraction of time in the reconstructed audio - what is known as ‘true peak’
But normalisation is not the same as dynamic range or compression - its simply more about maximising the quality or reducing the aliaisng errors for a given peak sound level for a track - or album.
Normalisation if used will be applied after the production master is created - and will typically be done at the same time as any added dither etc for distribution masters.
Compression maximises the sound over a period of time - and typically maximises the energy for various different bands of frequencies such as high, medium and low over a period of time. Compression also uses methods such as sidechaining which makes bass heavy music sound more impactful and musical and it feels like it times better. (this is about dynamically compressing baed on what is happening eleswhere in the frequency map - often used used in EDM and dance pop music to give strong bass lines and rhythmic bass patterns… as well as the over-the-top pumping effect that was fashionable some years ago. Compression and multi band compression typically makes a track sound more vibrant and musical and time better - which is why it’s done. But this in turn should not be confused with loudness compression.
Loudness compression is measured over a period of time (seconds) however is measured in LUFS and is typically used to combine the dynamic ranges in a mix master into a composite signal of controlled dynamic variability - which is sometimes referred to the as the ‘DR’ in audiophile circles - and is used extensively in audio replay and transmission and in certain areas is regulated through standardisation such as on TV and Radio. This is primarily about different track loudness levels reasonably consistent… However you will typically hear quite a variation on CD - which might have you constantly going for the volume control if you are playing back multiple tracks from different CDs.
Different streamer service provides have their own LUFS standards - I have posted these before on this forum. If you are distributing via a particular streamer service you need to comply with their LUFS specification or expect to have your master modified/processed.
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Thank you for the explanation Simon. I take it that LUT stands for look up table. Is there any site where I can find the DRs for albums available on Qobuz for example?
To my mind, and obviously I may be totally wrong, the higher the DR number the greater the volume between the quietest part of the recording and the loudest - dynamic range. There may be several versions available for a particular recording and I would like to target the highest DR rated version.
Obviously the SQ of a recording is more than dynamic range. Also, the type of music listened to can still sound great with a DR of maybe 3 or 4. In my experience classical orchestral has the highest DR numbers (17 or more for some of my collection) and obviously dynamic swings are huge.
Sorry - I had a brain f*rt - I meant LUFS not LUT… LUFS is Loudness Unit with respect to Full Scale. - corrected the above post.
The LUFS for various popular streaming services are here
Qobuz doesn’t appear listed. Yes LUFS is the perceived loudness over a 3 second interval - so quiet passages in music are made more consistent with louder passages (note not the same level as) , but it minimises any loss on the rhythmic flow and the feel of dynamics in the music material.
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Thanks again. I have just read the article and found it informative.
I do enjoy streaming from Qobuz and don’t get too hung up on aurally assessing the recording, rather just enjoying the music. This is a generalisation though and sometimes I dismiss an album quickly if I don’t like the SQ.
Qobuz is great for discovering new music but partly due to not knowing how long an album will be available on Qobuz and the desire to get the best possible SQ recording of that particular album, I want to be able to purchase more music.
I don’t necessarily want to purchase the exact same version as is streamed but don’t know how to determine the quality at the point of purchase.
I only use my streamer for casual listening via internet radio and when I want to audition a potential purchase.
If you believe the artists, and there’s no reason not to, they make far less money from streaming compared to their share from a physical media purchase. Plus it keeps the manufacturers of the physical media in business too.
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