High Quality Music ?

Anyone know of a place that sells high quality music downloads ?

As I've upgraded headphones to the DT990 Pro's and gotten the Asus STX II I've noticed a lot of my music has some really low quality segments and it's starting to be an earache.

Any info is appreciated

A number listed on here. Some can be silly expensive for what they are and can make more sense to buy the CD and rip it to FLAC yourself.

Awesome thanks bud

As per a thread on here a while ago, most people couldn't tell the difference between 320kbps mp3 and flac, a number of those with much higher end audio equipment as well.

Ayahuasca said:

As per a thread on here a while ago, most people couldn't tell the difference between 320kbps mp3 and flac, a number of those with much higher end audio equipment as well.

Click to expand...

Well it doesn't need to be FLAC as a lot of the MP3's I have aren't exactly good quality so 320kbps would be a nice step up

Ayahuasca said:

As per a thread on here a while ago, most people couldn't tell the difference between 320kbps mp3 and flac, a number of those with much higher end audio equipment as well.

Click to expand...

I have a few 96kHz (and above) FLAC recordings because they have been remastered to produce the best possible sound quality - it's the remastering not the encoding that makes most difference and the difference between these and the original versions is noticeable.

Otherwise I just encode CDs to 24/44.1 FLAC because why would I record to a lower quality than the CD itself if space is not an issue?

Mastering > Encoding. You can pick almost any artist (easiest with rock tbh) with albums spanning the 80-00s and you can hear an audible difference in audio quality - even at the same bitrate. Music started to get compressed a lot more, even in the mastering stage This is also extremely noticeable with re-releases of old albums - get an original and compare it to the re-release and there is a very obvious difference in sq.

Best bet is to rip CDs to FLAC. Can get CDs dirt cheap now as no-one wants them - everyone relies on digital downloads/streaming.

I think the volume wars started in the mid 90's and a lot of releases are noticeably inferior due to the ridiculous amount of clipping - sadly it's still going on today.

A good example is Night Visions by Imagine Dragons - truly awful sound quality, simply because the levels have been boosted too much

That too... A shame - or rather it would be if I listened to more than a handful of 'modern' bands

7Digital offer 320kps and FLAC downloads if that's any help.

I have a 24/96 FLAC vinyl rip of 'In Rainbows' that stands head and shoulders above anything else I have, I also have 320kps MP3s that completely rinse certain Indie CD FLAC rips, it's more to do with the production than pure file format and compression.

On the whole though 128k MP3 is pretty dire no matter how good the source material, all IMO of course.

I ripped my whole 2k+ CD collection lossless a few years ago and it's often impossible to tell the CD rips apart from later bought MP3 albums, and over the years that's been through a whole host of high end headphones and Hi-Fi with an RRP of near enough £10k.

Stick me blindfold in a room with source, amp and speakers costing £1500 and 10k and I don't think I could tell which was which

Depends what they are, all solid state and some big hard to drive speakers and I'd agree, it's all much of a muchness, the differences are stark when compared to high sensitivity speakers and low power valve amps in front of a good vinyl source.

The quality of solid state gear nowadays means it's just a case of picking which one you like the look of and having the features you want, sound wise there's nothing in it.

Ayahuasca said:

As per a thread on here a while ago, most people couldn't tell the difference between 320kbps mp3 and flac, a number of those with much higher end audio equipment as well.

Click to expand...

I think that test was a bit flawed - none the least when I first did it through firefox it was impossible to tell the samples apart whereas pulling them out of the cache and playing through a media player externally showed some differences.