I'm glad I came across this thread. I just bought Warren Zevon's Excitable Boy album from HD Tracks in 96/24 FLAC expecting to here an old favorite at a new level of clarity. Instead I got something that was clearly distorted and difficult to listen to. At first I thought my headphone amp was acting up but playing some known good tracks from my collection quickly proved that was not the case.
I think I'll try writing to HD Tracks and try to get a refund.
EDIT> Just received this back from HD Tracks...
Please note, we receive up to date masters from the record labels. The masters are created from the original analog recordings. We do not record or master anything at HDTracks. We are only a retailer. We do not rip CDS, upsample or downsample. All the music is recorded and mastered by the labels.
Each record label has their own recording/mastering process when it comes to high res. Unfortunately there is no universal standard. Sometimes the high res mastering and its clarity may present qualities that originally were unnoticeable or masked over in first released or in previous formats. We do ask that our label partners have taken note of that.We also ask the labels to provide as much information as possible about the recordings but they sometimes will only provided what they want. We do provided all that we have on the album in the details page ("about this album").
As a one time courtesy, we will refund the cost of the item. However, we would not be able to do so in the future as we normally cannot return items for subjective reasons
