High-Resolution Audio Question

TheHitMan-1973

TheHitMan-1973

TheHitMan-1973

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Does anybody know where i can listen to High-Resolution Audio music

I am thinking about joining Spotify but not sure if its High-Resolution Audio or just standard audio , does not seem a lot of call for High-Resolution Audio music these days and its a shame not more around

I have a few High-Resolution Audio products which i have in my collection

Sony MDR-1A High-Resolution Audio Headphones
Sony MDR-MDR-1ADAC Headphones with Built-in DAC
Sony SRS-99 Wireless Speaker with Wi-Fi/Bluetooth
 
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Spotify uses reasonably high bit-rate encoding but its not really "high resolution" audio. I doubt most people would really care though unless they have 10s of thousands worth of high end equipment.
 
"High resolution audio" is marketing guff. It's just fancy wording for lossless designed to draw in the Beats crowd who know jack about audio.
 
Marsman said:
"High resolution audio" is marketing guff. It's just fancy wording for lossless designed to draw in the Beats crowd who know jack about audio.
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Not that I disagree with your sentiments, but it depends if the OP genuinely means true high resolution audio or simply lossless CD audio formats such as FLAC.

CD audio is mastered at 16bit/44.1 kHz, Sony are pushing 24bit/96kHz. Clearly you need the right equipment to hear any discernible difference.

As an example, Underworld re-released their Dubnobasswithmyheadman album in 2014 with 2.0 24bit / 96KHz PCM, 24bit / 96KHz DTS-HD Master Audio and 24bit / 96KHz Dolby True HD formats.
 
Hi resolution audio sometimes called pure audio is an uncompressed DTS Master Audio, or Dolby True HD. They are supplied on BluRay discs as the files are too large to fit on SACD or DVD-A.
Bit rates are 24 bit 384 KHz as opposed to the 16 bit 44.1KHz.

Yet again though, Sony a company which appears to be run by lawyers have destroyed the format by ridiculous copy protection wrecking what could have been a promised audiophile format.

The audio out from any device can only be via HDMI which doesn't carry the clock signal or analogue audio.

I doubt that they will allow anyone to stream these formats over the internet.

You will need a BluRay player such as the Oppo BDP series if you want to play these discs.

http://www.naxos.com/blu-ray_audio.asp

It is possible to record the Master tapes onto BluRay Audio without compression, so the Bob Marley pure audio disc certainly sounds better than the CD version.
 
Fist of all there is no difference between 16 bit and 24 bit audio in terms of what the human ear can hear. All they do is take what is in 16 bit audio and spread the range out so they add stuff in we cannot hear but I'm sure other animals probably can. Plenty of articles discussing this in sound city part of the forums where audio enthusiasts hang out.

Second of all Sony stuff is crap and not really high end at all. It's more low to mid end.

The fact you can get a pair of brand name headphones with a DAC/AMP built in for £200 proves this.

My DAC/AMP is non branded and it cost me £120 then about £80 in tubes (valves) and that is probably mid-high end and doesn't include the cost of any headphones on top.

Spotify has 3 different audio quality settings. I doubt you could hear the difference between the highest setting and FLAC/Blu Ray with your gear.

If you want better quality then buy a set of AKG Q701's and HD600's or HD650's as a starting point.

You could always look into planar magnetics but then your talking £500-£800 on a set of headphones then another £500 for a DAC/AMP to really take advantage of them.

If you want a good budget setup then look into a company called Schiit, it's American but they make decent stuff at a very good price. I own one of their Vali (tube) amps.

Get yourself a proper DAC/AMP setup from Schiit and a proper set of headphones from either AKG, Sennheiser, HifiMan, Audeze or Beyerdynamic.
 
Psycho Sonny said:
Fist of all there is no difference between 16 bit and 24 bit audio in terms of what the human ear can hear. All they do is take what is in 16 bit audio and spread the range out so they add stuff in we cannot hear but I'm sure other animals probably can. Plenty of articles discussing this in sound city part of the forums where audio enthusiasts hang out.

Second of all Sony stuff is crap and not really high end at all. It's more low to mid end.

The fact you can get a pair of brand name headphones with a DAC/AMP built in for £200 proves this.

My DAC/AMP is non branded and it cost me £120 then about £80 in tubes (valves) and that is probably mid-high end and doesn't include the cost of any headphones on top.

Spotify has 3 different audio quality settings. I doubt you could hear the difference between the highest setting and FLAC/Blu Ray with your gear.

If you want better quality then buy a set of AKG Q701's and HD600's or HD650's as a starting point.

You could always look into planar magnetics but then your talking £500-£800 on a set of headphones then another £500 for a DAC/AMP to really take advantage of them.

If you want a good budget setup then look into a company called Schiit, it's American but they make decent stuff at a very good price. I own one of their Vali (tube) amps.

Get yourself a proper DAC/AMP setup from Schiit and a proper set of headphones from either AKG, Sennheiser, HifiMan, Audeze or Beyerdynamic.
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I agree with you my Sony headphones are not as good as AKG, Sennheiser, HifiMan, Audeze or Beyerdynamic , have to say my Sony SRS-99 is a good bit of kit
 
"Fist of all there is no difference between 16 bit and 24 bit audio in terms of what the human ear can hear. All they do is take what is in 16 bit audio and spread the range out so they add stuff in we cannot hear but I'm sure other animals probably can."

This simply isn't true! 'They' (whoever 'they' are) do not take a 16 bit recording and re-encode it to 24 bit ! If you had bothered to read the Naxos page I linked to, you will see that all their recordings are made in the native format, and not simply upscaled.

24 bit does not 'add stuff in we cannot hear', it increases the sample rate, which means a greater dynamic range, which is why these formats need the volume turned up.

On a hardware forum you might expect people to realise that the quality of DACs is not all the same and that there are some which are better than others !

The CD format is stereo only, whereas the others are multichannel, which anyone can hear the difference !
 
http://www.head-fi.org/t/415361/24bit-vs-16bit-the-myth-exploded

"So, if you accept the facts, why does 24bit audio even exist, what's the point of it? There are some useful application for 24bit when recording and mixing music. In fact, when mixing it's pretty much the norm now to use 48bit resolution. The reason it's useful is due to summing artefacts, multiple processing in series and mainly headroom. In other words, 24bit is very useful when recording and mixing but pointless for playback. Remember, even a recording with 60dB dynamic range is only using 10bits of data, the other 6bits on a CD are just noise. So, the difference in the real world between 16bit and 24bit is an extra 8bits of noise.

I know that some people are going to say this is all rubbish, and that “I can easily hear the difference between a 16bit commercial recording and a 24bit Hi-Rez version”. Unfortunately, you can't, it's not that you don't have the equipment or the ears, it is not humanly possible in theory or in practice under any conditions!! Not unless you can tell the difference between white noise and white noise that is well below the noise floor of your listening environment!! If you play a 24bit recording and then the same recording in 16bit and notice a difference, it is either because something has been 'done' to the 16bit recording, some inappropriate processing used or you are hearing a difference because you expect a difference."
 
I'm afraid that article only addresses Bit Depth and not the entire picture.

Have a read at http://tweakheadz.com/16-bit-vs-24-bit-audio/ Which does, and the writer does appear to know his stuff.

As he concludes, the technology is now at a state where the recording technique matters more than almost anything else. For some reason Bat out of Hell is a dreadful recording even though the music is good. The SACD is even worse! To me it's unlistenable, same with Radioactive by Imagine Dragons, which has been recorded at too high a level and clips on the bass drum.
There have been tales of recording engineers transposing the front & rear channels on some SACD recordings.

As media resolutions have become higher, the need for good recording technique has become ever greater, and it just might be that applying the latest recording techniques and equipment to old master tapes is making them sound far better than they ever did when first released on CD.

Pink Floyds Dark Side of the Moon has hardly been heard by anyone as it was originally recorded, in Quadraphonic, the SACD version reproduces this beautifully with the running man moving around the rooms, and the chiming clocks all around the listener. Definitely one to buy.

In Short, you can hear the difference between 16 bit 44.1KHz and 24bit 192KHz, but it might not be all that much of one.
 
TheHitMan-1973 said:
Don`t think Sony would give false statements over there headphones :) do you
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No never not even the SUPERBASSSSSSSSSSSSSS headphones they sell that look like dubstep earmuffs.

Also Sony really push that APT-X like they own it. It's still wireless, it's still substandard.
 
Psycho Sonny said:
Second of all Sony stuff is crap and not really high end at all. It's more low to mid end.

The fact you can get a pair of brand name headphones with a DAC/AMP built in for £200 proves this.

My DAC/AMP is non branded and it cost me £120 then about £80 in tubes (valves) and that is probably mid-high end and doesn't include the cost of any headphones on top.

Spotify has 3 different audio quality settings. I doubt you could hear the difference between the highest setting and FLAC/Blu Ray with your gear.

If you want better quality then buy a set of AKG Q701's and HD600's or HD650's as a starting point.

You could always look into planar magnetics but then your talking £500-£800 on a set of headphones then another £500 for a DAC/AMP to really take advantage of them.

If you want a good budget setup then look into a company called Schiit, it's American but they make decent stuff at a very good price. I own one of their Vali (tube) amps.

Get yourself a proper DAC/AMP setup from Schiit and a proper set of headphones from either AKG, Sennheiser, HifiMan, Audeze or Beyerdynamic.
Click to expand...

Some of the Sony headphones are pure trash but some of the MDR series have been used for reference studio use for years - sure its not ultra high end stuff but some of their stuff is reasonably good mid-range.

Having taken a bit more of an interest in such matters lately I'm not as impressed by Schiit as I used to be - I actually find my DIY amp more sonically pleasing (though that might somewhat be bias) but definitely has them beat for noise floor - and that is on prototype board - unfortunately getting comparable RMAA results, etc. is a bit difficult but rudimentary numbers suggest the THD, etc. is better on mine.
 
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Well there is the Sony MDR-R10, one of the best headphones ever made, after the Sennheiser HE90 Orpheus and Stax SR-009 :D
 
Flake87 said:
Hi resolution audio sometimes called pure audio is an uncompressed DTS Master Audio, or Dolby True HD. They are supplied on BluRay discs as the files are too large to fit on SACD or DVD-A.
Bit rates are 24 bit 384 KHz as opposed to the 16 bit 44.1KHz.


You will need a BluRay player such as the Oppo BDP series if you want to play these discs.

http://www.naxos.com/blu-ray_audio.asp
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The "pure audio" discs will actually play on ANY blu ray player, not just expensive stuff. Not that ive got any cheap stuff .....love my arcam bdp300 :D
 
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