My reference loudspeakers is unusual; its made by Velour a small German company. I do not think they are made any more. The speakers had very good sound-stage depth, with an excellent bass for a relatively small loudspeaker. Headphones - Noble K10, Audeze, and Nighthawks. The majority of the listening tests was on loudspeakers.
Rob
Surprising to read that you are not using something truly full range as a reference for speakers.
Imho, the most transparent and realistic sound for hi res large scale classical recordings are electrostatic speakers.
All traditional "box speakers" I have heard sound more coloured than electrostatic speakers again imho.
Regarding headphones I am not familiar with Noble K10 ,but I have heard some Audeze and I would like to audition their LCD4 before deciding to upgrade from my current HD800.
Are you using the LCD4?
I was really tempted to get the HE1000 in Singapore last week it sounded great both via Dave Hugo and Mojo, but there were some issues with really complex orchestral tutti at full blast ie fff level ,where my HD 800 taking a step back sounded more open and resolved.
But the HE 1000 was oh so sweet on a lot of classical with good inner detail even at very low levels.
Getting to that point which you asked me about in the other post.
Apart from really bad overmic'd multic'd where hi res can actually sound worse than low res 16/44.1. But in most other cases hi res 24/96 and DSD sounds clearly better smoother and generally more realistic than even 24/44.1 to my ears and and the recording engineers/producers conductors I have talked to regarding 16/44.1 compared to higher res. No one in the past 15 years I believe records at lowly!! 16/44.1.
Why skip so much of the music?
If you only sample now and then at rates that computers of 30 years ago could handle of course you are going to miss a lot of what has happened between the too few samples taken!
16/44.1 is still a delivery format, but luckily only that. No one records 16/44.1 even in the pop industry any longer I think?
And the difference is not only that loud passages sound less artificial and DIGITAL but that ppp also sounds smoother and has more body when hi res is properly mic'd and done well.
Yes it can sound worse too. But only when you let the pop approach destroy the sound.
Unfortunately even some classical labels do compromise balance and SQ for boombox owners.
Quoting an engineer/producer I know who has worked with classical since the days of analogue" WE immediately heard something was wrong with digital although we were told it was perfect. Not until the introduction of 24/96 and now DSD does it sound good again."
Morten Lindberg of 2L told me that he could live with 20 bits but not anything less than 24/96 sampling-wise and he too works on a daily basis with live versus recorded. I don't but have been to enough sessions and many ,many live concerts and rehearsals and for me hi res and DSD was the only thing that made me listen to digital music on a regular basis.
The only classical pro I know who argued that bits are more important than sampling rate has been Robert von Bahr the owner of BIS records who long claimed that 24/44.1 was enough. But now they record at 24/96. IMO the results are obvious. 24/96 with the same miking from Singapore for example sounds clearly smoother and more as the live sound in the hall than the earlier 24/44.1 to me.
In other words everything else equal, hi res almost always sounds better and more realistic to me.
I have recently discovered a classical label that records most projects in DXD and releases at anything from DXD to 24/96 and also DSD 256 down to 64.
The label is Challenge Classics and they make some of the most natural and best sounding classical recordings on the market judging from the recordings I have heard from them.Their Bruckner 1 sounded sublimely natural via Dave.
Superbly natural well balanced takes of orchestras playing in a real live acoustic that "challenges" some of the old majors like DGG and Decca
that far too often seem to mic things for the pop crowd and boom boxer owners, these days.
And although only done in DSD 64 Jared Sacks who also works on an almost daily basis and prefers working in DSD and balance in analogue at sessions thus being maybe the only one actually taking full advantage of DSD 64 avoiding adding up more DSD noise at mixing desk.His recent Mahler 9 sounds clearly better and ,more like the real thing than any 16/44.1 I have ever heard.
I hope he will make more recordings at DSD 256 in the future.
He did a test comparison recording between DSD 64 and 256 recently.
I know you are no fan of DSD. But it sure sounds better than 16/44,.1 in spite of all its noise/resolution problems to my ears.
16/44.1 belongs to history imo.
I think it is possibly time to put DSD 64 there too.
Both formats were compromises made for lacking physical disc capacities no longer needed.
As a photographer I too know I can interpolate missing information up to a certain level but then pixels become visible.With low res audio" the audio pixels"are sometimes painfully audible to me. I always use a full frame hi res digital camera instead of a compact camera with a small sensor when I want the very best result technically possible.
16/44.1 has puny little sensor .
I also am aware that the bandwith limited audio signal can be recovered in theory. But why settle for bandwith limited when the original live signal is not bandwith limited?Triangle and some other percussion instruments of a symphony orchestra have harmonics up to 90 to 100khz if I remember correctly.
The only genre that matters to me personally is acoustic music and that genre deserves the best we can get.There is still a wide gap betwen the real thing and difgital audio imho. And 16/44.1 is, good as it can sound on less demanding material,is far from the best imo.
Yes it sounds better than before via Hugo but still not good enough for me.
And none of the music I listen to is recorded at16/44.1, so why would I bother with it?
I did not listen to any 16/44.1 via Dave.
I don't own more than a handful of rbcds but a couple of hundred SACDs. And more than five hundred LPs and over 2 gigabytes of hi res music.
Cheers Chris