Walkdude
New Head-Fier
I use the word "classical" in quotes because it seems like shops call anything from Gregorian chant to Philip Glass and not rock/jazz/electronica "classical."
I've just about had it with shops like NativeDSD and ProStudioMasters: they charge outrageous prices to download crazy gigantic files that rarely sound much better than your bog standard Redbook 44.1/16 CD. Yeah, you can play the reciprocity game with their bogus prices and goofy secret coupons in your email, but that gets old in a hurry.
It is actually getting hard to find places that release redbook audio: many new albums are only available as minimum 96KHz/24bit and even that is probably overkill. Looking at NativeDSD's current "Album of the Week," I have to wonder: can a solo piano really make any noises that need DSD256 to capture? Perhaps if you dropped it from a 3rd story window and you wanted to capture every last transient generated by the crash of crunching wood and snapping strings?
Old greybeards please enlighten me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK, I can find just about ZERO scientific evidence anyone can really tell the difference between HD audio and redbook. What I can find is gales of hot air...usually generated by people wanting to sell HD audio.
So far the best I can find is eclassical.com, which often offers 44.1KHz/16bit FLACs even for new albums.
I've just about had it with shops like NativeDSD and ProStudioMasters: they charge outrageous prices to download crazy gigantic files that rarely sound much better than your bog standard Redbook 44.1/16 CD. Yeah, you can play the reciprocity game with their bogus prices and goofy secret coupons in your email, but that gets old in a hurry.
It is actually getting hard to find places that release redbook audio: many new albums are only available as minimum 96KHz/24bit and even that is probably overkill. Looking at NativeDSD's current "Album of the Week," I have to wonder: can a solo piano really make any noises that need DSD256 to capture? Perhaps if you dropped it from a 3rd story window and you wanted to capture every last transient generated by the crash of crunching wood and snapping strings?
Old greybeards please enlighten me if I'm wrong, but AFAIK, I can find just about ZERO scientific evidence anyone can really tell the difference between HD audio and redbook. What I can find is gales of hot air...usually generated by people wanting to sell HD audio.
So far the best I can find is eclassical.com, which often offers 44.1KHz/16bit FLACs even for new albums.
