[SoulSyde]

Hip-hop is often known for it's dirty-gritty feel, but many times that's attributed to a poorly recorded or mixed album.  A lot of Soul and Funk music (which Hip-Hop is mostly derivative of) has been recorded very well and benefits from being played on vinyl or ripped to lossless.  But, a lot of Hip-Hop (which largely samples from those genres) does not.  Many times I don't care if the Hip-Hop song I'm listening to is 128 kbps or .WAV because it's so compressed and poorly mixed that it doesn't matter... until recently.
 
The latest People Under the Stairs album Highlighter, is being offered in 24-bit HD AAC, and I man I'm glad it is.  Not only is it a great album, but it's sonically superior to anything they've released thus far.  There are many other artists that are putting out well recorded Hip-Hop albums that benefit from being played on high end headphone and speaker gear, such as:
The Roots
Kno
Pete Rock (recent works)
CunninLynguists (recent works)
 
This may spark some debate, but what else have you found in the Hip-Hop genre that you would consider being a "well recorded album?"

 

[Parall3l]

Subscribed, I've been trying to get Highlighter but couldn't find that pre-paid gift card I use for online shopping. 

 "How I Got Over" by The Roots feels very nice to my ears, especially the first minute of "A Peace of Light".

 

[SoulSyde]

Highlighter is arguably their best album to date.  Their other albums had a couple of amazing tracks, but the entire album felt lacking to me.  Highlighter is the first album that plays great from start to finish; Some tracks better than others, a few show stoppers, but as a whole simply amazing.  Obviously, I'm a big fan.

 

[CatboyMac]

Floetry - Floetic

 
ex. If I Was a Bird

 

[Satellite_6]

I looked up HD AAC and I started laughing, but I'll check these guys out. 

 

[SoulSyde]

@CatboyMac, Floetry is really R&B and not Hip-Hop, but nice vibe.

 

[keenween]

Slum Village

 

[SoulSyde]

Quote:

I looked up HD AAC and I started laughing, but I'll check these guys out. 

 

[Satellite_6]

Quote:

Ah, well it has some marketing crap about how higher sample rates etc. are better than CD quality, and it's made by the people who made the mp3 encoder that's inferior to LAME. In addition, I don't think anything can replace FLAC at this point, which has been out for years and has the same capability as far as I know. 
 
http://www.iis.fraunhofer.de/en/bf/amm/produkte/audiocodec/audiocodecs/hdaac/
 

 

[SoulSyde]

Gotcha, I see your point and I agree.  For Hip-Hop it's a step in the right direction.  Despite who it's made by.

 

[ScottieB]

The great thing about good hip hop is that the mixing and mastering often reveal all kind of great touches. The only hi-res hip hop album that comes to mind immediately is a DVD-Audio of Outkast's Stankonia. Damn good album that sounds damn good DVD-A.

 

[SoulSyde]

Another good one.  Outkast's tracks were always clean.