Interesting, and yes hardrives can and do fail.
But since the late 1980s I have not seen ANY classical recording session using either analogue tape or direct to disc recording.
But they sure could sound very good indeed.
Virtually ALL recordings made since the early 90s are made with computers and I can't see or actually hear how transferring a digital file to a physical disc could or would, in any way improve on what's been stored digitally as ones and zeros on a harddrive?
Safe storage is another subject imho.
When I can clearly hear that transports sound different and influence the SQ, to me at least it seems that the best way is to play back the digital files directly without the need of a disc and transport for anything except Direct Cut LPs of course.
Convenient and capable of very good SQ yes, but rbcd discs even Mscaled do not sound as realistic as hi res via my humble Qutest/HMS macbookpro and usb all else equal.
I personally use a mac because I am a photographer. But all sessions I've been to have used PCs for recording and playback of native masters.
CD transport playback will always be second generation and lower res than the hi res master.
Nobody records at 16/44.1 since many years.
Cheers CC
I think you are simplifying the situation somewhat. Virtually every digital storage mechanism, from optical to magnetic tape to spinning disc hard drive to SD card to SSD involves ”storage” and transport”. There’s no way to get bits into a DAC without storage and transport, even if you use WiFi. Given the error prone nature of every storage and transport mechanism, error correction is absolutely vital to ensuring bits are not corrupted during either storage or transport. At the end of the day, long term reliability is everything. In my experience, regardless of convenience, nothing beats optical storage. Nothing. I own no storage media from the mid 1980s that still works except my CDs. The other storage media — 5.25“ floppy disks, Zip disks, SCSI disks, the list is endless — have all disappeared or don’t work. SD cards are so flimsy I don’t trust them at all. I own about 6000 CDs, including perhaps 800 SACDs, and they’re not going anywhere. I’ve ripped them all, but I don’t trust my hard drive storage media for long term archival storage. I could put in all in the cloud using my Dropbox. Expensive for one. In 10 years, will Dropbox survive? Who knows? I certainly enjoy Roon and Quobuz for high Rez. Will either Roon or Quobuz survive in 10 years? Who knows? These are not highly profitable businesses. The vast majority of humanity, like 99.99%, are perfectly happy with MP3s. High Rez is for geeks. I for one see no alternative but optical media for long term reliable storage of music. Of course, my house could burn down in one of these California fires. I’d have bigger problems then, and my music would be the least of them!
As for high Rez, I‘m waiting to hear a high Rez recording that sounds better than the best red book cd I have heard through my CEC TL0, upscale through a really good processor like the M-scaler. I certainly enjoy my 800 SACDs. Do any of them sound better than my best red book CDs? Nope. I have over 1000 classical and jazz 24 bit 96khz classical, folk, jazz and rock albums in my Qobuz playlist. I can’t say any of them sounds better than the best red book upscaled CDs. I think high Rez is primarily useful for giving some extra bandwidth during recording, just lie internally a lot of Mac use 64 bit width signal processing for Core Audio.
Can you actually hear the difference between 24 bit and 16 bit audio? I would argue this is theoretically impossible. Many listening tests have been done and reported in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society journal by Floyd Toole and others. These have not shown significant differences in audio perception. It’s not surprising why. The average moving coil loudspeaker has typically 1-5% harmonic distortion when played around 90dB. In the bass, it’s much worse. Distortion of 10% in the bass frequencies is quite typical. My Quads are a complete exception. The original Quad 63 has less than 0.1% THD above 100 hz up to about 96dB. This is orders of magnitude better than any moving coil loudspeaker. Headphones are no better.
Now, through such a distorted physical medium like a moving coil loudspeaker or headphone, you are trying to argue that you can hear the difference between 16 bit audio (with distortion less than -90dB, or 0.001%, and subjectively lower when properly dithered), and 24 bit audio (which theoretically goes down to -140dB, but no DAC on the planet can truly resolve 24 bit audio regardless of the marketing brochures). I don’t buy your logic. Of course, subjectively we all want to believe high Rez must sound better. DSD must sound better, right? I haven’t found that to the case in my experience. It’s not surprising why. No analog reproduction medium (preamp, amp, moving coil speaker etc.) exists that comes remotely close to meeting even 16 bit digital bandwidth, forget 24 bit or 32 bit. Analog distortion is 10,000 times worse than 16 bit audio. Compare the measurement of a $100 CD player with the world‘s best headphone or loudspeaker. The CD player far far less distortion, far higher dynamic range, and much much flatter frequency response. There‘s a reason why Stereophile never publishes distortion measurements of loudspeakers. They are so bad it’s a sick joke. They are incredibly nonlinear. Huge intermodulation distortion. It’s a miracle a voice sounds like a voice when we hear it reproduces, it’s more a tribute to our brain given the total hash loudspeakers make of the input given to them. Feed a square wave through a loudspeaker, and you get gibberish out, except for the rare phase true loudspeaker like the Quads.
