For more context, I bought a 24/192 track off mora.jp. It caused audible hissing with native 24/192 playback on my Zen DAC. Experimenting with just high-passing the ultrasonic noise, I can still hear the (loud!) audible hissing.
A few days into this rabbit hole later, it turns out that they most likely did a direct DSD to PCM conversion without properly filtering out the HF (high frequency) noise. Experimenting with doing the same myself with the DSD version of the track yielded the same results (audible hiss on playback due to HF noise).
@Thad E Ginathom fair points. I guess I'm just a bit sour that I paid more for music that doesn't even play back properly on my DAC. I do fully agree on the mastering point. Kills me when music I love is compressed to and clips like all hell.
FWIW, the fact that I can finally buy lossless tracks (as Hi-Res) is why I haven't needed to import CDs all the way from Japan anymore as their non Hi-Res stuff is lossy.
Two opposite views are already presented well :) My takeaways are (1) hi-res "format" itself is a joke -- 99% humans don't need higher res than red book; (2) hi-res end products sometimes make sense as they're often more free from over-compression. Maybe I am a little biased from some great sacds I heard before.
I'll never forget buying an expensive double-album Mahler symphony, back in the days when music was synonymous with vinyl, but also digital mastering was getting going. The disappointment finding that it sounded... dead. I guess these kinds of disappointments are perennial. Just get updated to new formats.
And yes, if the music you want is easy to purchase, buy it in the easy-to-get format.
@Vtory, Yes! I think what does sometime happen is that a person who sincerely believes in the hi-res stuff, however wrong they may be about that, also sincerly cares about the music and is able to get a great master done as part of the project. That's a win, and the hi-res format is then just by the way.
Read these "rules" AND introduce
yourself before your first post
Being true to what the artists intended
(opinion / entertainment piece)
Comments on Profile Post by Kouon