Are many of you using the HD Track master tape recordings ?

I spent a little while working with the Audio Engineers in recording studios earlier in my career while I was writing software for high end digital mastering console and I was surprised to see that you could get the final master tape recordings at up to 192kHz x 24 bits on HD Tracks.com

http://www.hdtracks.com/

The Master tapes are the original source material before it is down-sampled for CD, SACD or vinyl so it should be the absolute highest audio integrity of anything that you could start with.

Since my OPPO 105D can stream media up to 192x24, it seems like these recordings would be best possible input source available to feed my incredibly accurate Martin Logan speakers.

Have any of you tried them?

Considering that they are much higher resolution than even my SACD's I'm sure they sound great. The big question is whether I can actually hear a difference between the original source and an SACD or normal CD for that matter.

My guess is that most systems couldn't come close to resolving that detail or even close to it. I believe Martin Logan's can probably come closer to resolve that level of detail than just about any other speaker on the market. BUT I still wonder if I will be able to notice any difference.

Thoughts ?

Listing to the original recordings directly off the Master reels is a luxury I only enjoyed for about a year. It was surprising to hear the tracks that they didn't use on a album in the name of uniformity. Sometimes it was almost heartbreaking to hear the cut that finally made it to release.

OK, I'm reading reviews and seeing hit or miss on the masters.

It appears some of them are fantastic, and others are only so so.

Hmmm....

Yeah, it's the same with many of the hi res files you can buy.. some of them sound awesome and some of them sound crap. I bought the hi res versoin of Yes' "going for the one" from HD Tracks and was really disappointed. The flac i ripped from the remastered CD sounds way better. I've since learned that it's good to read reviews on the hi res releases to see what others say the quality is like. It really depends on the original recording they're using to create the hi res files.

I found the stevehoffman forums. Are there other places that you would recommend for reviews ?

I am very quickly realizing how much of a newbie I am, but I like learning curves

I'm a noob too. Just using Google to find reviews on the albums I'm interested in.

Hi guys. I've downloaded / bought about a dozen HDTrack albums. I've been thrilled to date and notice a blank canvas from which the music emerges. I'll definitely look at reviews going forward to ascertain incremental advantage. Note that I download FLAC file versions on laptop and move to Olive 6HD music server. The 6HD includes hundreds of free streaming commercial free 'Internet radio' stations which can be selected by country, genre and fidelity (e.g 192/24 smooth jazz). The higher fidelity stations are Best by lots. Britain and Germany have best 'stations'!


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I've purchased a number of recordings (primarily orchestral and opera) from HDTracks and compared them to the CD copies that I own. In each case, the 24 bit copies sound better. I've A/B'd them for friends, and everyone hears the difference. It's not a huge difference but it's there. You're more aware of the space in the hall where it was recorded. The highs are more rich.

I have also A/B'd the same 24 bit files with different sampling rates 192/96 and 44khz. I cannot hear a difference between them. However, the bit depth going from 16 to 24 bit is always an improvement. So if I'm going to buy a recording from <HDTracks> and have an option of files with different sampling rates, I always choose the one with the lower rate. It's generally less expensive and, of course, it's a smaller file.

I agree with Tom's comment, earlier. Some recording sound terrific and some don't. Ultimately, it depends on how well a recording was originally recorded and mastered. I find, in general, recordings from the 50s and early 60s have more magic as they were less mic'd and less manipulated. I bought Pasty Cline's Greatest Hits from Acoustic Sounds (DSD files) and they say this is direct from 1/4-inch master tape with no EQ of any kind. It's impressive sounding!

For my friends who are into recordings and audio, they get excited about the improvement. For others, they acknowledge that it sounds better but they tell me the cost involved with the recordings (and the equipment to do it justice) doesn't justify it for them. There are a lot of people writing articles and posting to forums that say 24 bit recordings are a waste of money. As individuals, we are the only ones who need to be satisfied with our systems and the recordings we purchase.

KJoel,

It's nice to see another OPPO 105, Ethos pairing

My thoughts are that a minimal signal path with music streamed by WiFi, balanced cables to the amp to keep the noise floor down and 24 bit music should really work well.

Considering how compressed recordings tend to be today, are you finding that newer 24bit tracks sound any more relaxed or are they just at just at slightly lower base volume level off 0dB to allow for a bit more transient response? I would hope the 24bit recordings would have the volume down by maybe 6 dB to make better use of the improved noise floor and allowing a bit more impact on the transients. Most dynamic range controllers in the studio are crushing the transients hard to barely keep them from clipping while bringing the overall levels as high as possible. DRC's don't destroy your phasing, but they remove a lot of detail.

I could see how the older recordings that were not compressed to sound loud all the time should have a lot more range to them.

The difference in sampling frequency doesn't surprise me since the DAC's can already interpolate many points in between sample points such that any differences between 44.1, 96, and 192kHz are probably extremely small. However adding 50% more bit depth is an enormous improvement in dynamic range if they use it right.

I've yet to see an amplifier with a noise floor that would match the dynamic range of a 24bit recording. Of course 16bit recordings have a technical limitation of only 96dB before post processing dithering. So our CD players are already attempting to put back some of the body lost during the downsampling process. That is probably why the vinyl movement has some momentum. The natural noise from a record is probably doing the equivalent of dithering below the dynamic range that is on a record giving it a fuller sound that appeals to some and this dithering would occur a bit more noticeably.

I'm curious what my daughter is going to think of this. Most of what she listens to is full of autotone and techno or digitally created noise with a beat.

I've never measured sound levels so I can't contribute anything to your question other than what I mentioned earlier about a greater spatial quality to the sound. Also, I listen to very little other than classical music and opera, and I would bet that the post recording engineering for this type of music was/is not as manipulated as that of popular music...but I'm just guessing, here. I've been told that when many of these recordings were issued from early stereo mid 1950s on, they had to do some dynamic limiting in order to keep the needle from mis-tracking (I think I'm remembering this correctly) and I would hope that this is not imposed on the 24 bit re-issues.

I've also purchased some newly recorded music (recorded in 24 bit) from Hyperion Records and the audio quality is breathtaking. There's another site where I've purchased remasters of older recordings, HDTT (High Definition Tape Transfers) and in general, I don't like their offerings. I think they do a lot of tape hiss noise reduction. They sound manipulated. I've not noticed this with the music I've purchased from HDTracks.

I look forward to hearing your impressions of your Ethos. I've had mine since late June. I'd never heard an electrostatic speaker up to the point that I heard these and I was (and still am) blown away by them. I hope you enjoy yours, likewise.

Regarding your comments about minimizing the signal path, you might want to follow the threads on the AVS forum for the BDP-105 & 105D. There are quite a few who connect from the Oppo directly to their amplifiers with a lot of success. You then control the volume with the Oppo's volume control. I've not tried it.

KJoel said:

Regarding your comments about minimizing the signal path, you might want to follow the threads on the AVS forum for the BDP-105 & 105D. There are quite a few who connect from the Oppo directly to their amplifiers with a lot of success. You then control the volume with the Oppo's volume control. I've not tried it.

Click to expand...

That is exactly what I'm doing. I'm only setting up a stereo configuration in my den.

So I'm going balanced XLR from OPPO 105D directly to my amplifier. I've got 500W per channel into 4 ohms and they are rated well at that impedance until about 450W so hopefully they will handle the 0.8 ohm impedance at 20kHz pretty well.

I've been controlling the OPPO with their Media control software on my Android phone or my wife's iPad. They don't have the line of sight issues the IR OPPO remote has since they are talking by WiFi and the volume adjustment on them is a slider. So you can just straight to the volume you want, or you can use the - and + buttons if you are worried about accidentally putting it to 100%.

I'm streaming music from my workstation in my office which has about 5 Tb (total) of storage space. It's running 1Gb/s ethernet to my high speed wireless router and the OPPO is steaming all the way up to 192kHz x 24 with no problems. I can start and stop the music nearly instantly and jump around in a song without any perceivable lag time. The OPPO has a large internal buffer and I suspect it loads the entire audio track within the first second or two.

My office is just on the other side of the wall my stereo is on and the router is only about 16' away so the OPPO has a strong signal using only the USB WiFi stick that came with it.

My speakers will arrive on Tuesday. I didn't want to make the 6 hour round trip to pick them up. On Wednesday a friend of mine will bring over some of his favorite reference material for sound stage setup and we will see if we can get their placement tweaked.

Right now I'm serving music from my slowest 3Tb eSATA3 backup drive rather than my SSD drives and even at high resolutions these audio files are still small files to transfer over WiFi.

FWIW, my multi-media system is downstairs and that room is not nearly as good an environment especially with all the exercise equipment down there. My Den allows for the back wall to be 17' feet behind my listening area and I have a lot more flexibility with speaker placement.

I had a couple friends help me setup and place the speakers. We made a day/evening of it. It was a lot of fun. I recommend that you get a mono recording and use that, also, along with the reference material that your friend brings. We found the mono recording (stereo-mono) made it very easy to dial in the sweet spot.

I intend to give the direct connect to the amp. a try in the near future. My amp. is very heavy (110 lbs.) and sits on it's own stand next to my rack and the Oppo is at the opposite end so I'm going to have to do some component rearrangement in order to make it physically possible.

I also use Oppo's Media Controller app. for the iPad. It works pretty darned well. I have an SMB share set up with my Macbook and listen this way. Sometimes I have my 5 TB drive attached directly. It's the most dependable for me, although, the network connection works very well, also.

I'm not sure how to use the stereo-mono recording that way. I have a number of reference CD's that do different things like that.

I understood from the ML setup video that I wanted to try to adjust the distance from the back wall first until the reflections off the back wall become a nice ambiance and then the width between them to get the sound stage about right all the while trying to keep them toed in with their flashlight test for the edge of the inner third shining back and then when that seems about right put them on spikes and adjust the tilt a bit up. I think I have a good starting approximate triangular region for where I would typically be sitting. I guess I find out a lot more in a few days.

What I mean by "stereo-mono" is that some mono recordings have the identical material coming from both L & R channels. Some have it encoded as 1 channel. I have my Oppo's dedicated 2-channel outs configured as "Front Left/Right" rather than "Down-mixed Stereo" because I use these outputs instead of the multi-channel left & right outs for multi-channel material (and movies) as the DACs are better. I recently bought my MacIntosh amp. and this caught me as I was playing one of The Beatles' mono tracks and didn't hear anything (because I didn't have my multi-channel amp. turned on..and the track always plays through the center channel, only, based on my configuration). Oppo explained to me that if a mono track is encoded as 1 channel, only, then that's what the Oppo interprets and sends only to the center channel. Yet some old mono recordings I have play the material through both the right and left channels.

You'll have a lot fun setting these up. I had mine in their position for quite a period of time and then altered the rake (tilt) a bit back on the left speaker because I felt the string section in the orchestra was a bit to high (elevation) in the sound stage and WOW...it made quite a good change. These are terrific speakers!

KJoel said:

I've purchased a number of recordings (primarily orchestral and opera) from HDTracks and compared them to the CD copies that I own. In each case, the 24 bit copies sound better. I've A/B'd them for friends, and everyone hears the difference. It's not a huge difference but it's there. You're more aware of the space in the hall where it was recorded. The highs are more rich.

Click to expand...

It's not the bit depth causing it. You can play with bit depth in JRiver. You can start to hear a difference on 16 bit files at around 13 bits believe it or not. I once had a 14 bit Philips CDP. It sounded great - the first one they made I believe. The 16 bit Technics I later bought didn't sound so good. In fact - it sounded bad.

Think about it - you have a 2V output. Do you really think you can hear 2V divided by 2 raised to the power of 24 - 1 which is the least significant bit? Er... nope. You can't.

BTW I am not saying you and others can't hear a difference on these files. Also, 24 bit files should obviously obey the same laws as 16 bit ones i.e. you should start to hear a difference around the 13 bit mark i.e. when you have junked 11 bits of "audiophile" resolution:ROFL:.

User211 said:

It's not the bit depth causing it. You can play with bit depth in JRiver. You can start to hear a difference on 16 bit files at around 13 bits believe it or not. I once had a 14 bit Philips CDP. It sounded great - the first one they made I believe. The 16 bit Technics I later bought didn't sound so good. In fact - it sounded bad.

Think about it - you have a 2V output. Do you really think you can hear 2V divided by 2 raised to the power of 24 - 1 which is the least significant bit? Er... nope. You can't.

Click to expand...

I think with balanced outputs I'm using 4V, but my question is whether the 24bit recordings are less compressed. However I'm not sure if they are. When the studio engineers were using our Muse, the signal path was 56bits wide which would help avoid cumulative math errors, but I think the LSB's were just shaved off rather than binning the 24bit data down to 16bits. So odds are that the music is fully compressed even as a 24bit recording, but I don't know that for a fact.

The whole premise of MPG3 compression is to keep a similar amount of audio resolution floating with the overall signal level of the music with the idea that if the music is near 0db that you are no longer discerning the signal at -60dB. It's similar to how our eyes respond to light. With our irises dilated to handle a certain brightness level there is only a certain luminous range that we are capable of perceiving. It's still a lot better then current digital camera technology, but we can still only see a certain brightness level at any given time. I assume that same is true with our hearing.

Anyway I'm still looking forward to getting my speakers dialed in and seeing what they are capable of in my listening area.

Right now my wife is streaming Disco from Pandora through the OPPO to the TV working as the speaker I'm going to enjoy these speakers for what they can do but I also want more music playing in the house in general and not every audio moment has to be filled with audiophile wonder if you are enjoying the music!

Apparently Pandora streams at 128kbps to in home devices unless you pay $5 per month to get 192kps. Still my wife is bouncing around to the music and enjoying it.

..and that's what it's all about, for me. Enjoy the music.

There's a 24 bit 48K version of NIN's Hesitation Marks album and that is mixed differently to the 16 bit 44.1K version - Trent said so I seem to remember. It might be in the sleeve notes.

However, said album at 24 bit still clips in order to make it sound loud. You can tell that in JRiver too. You can also upsample to 192KHz where you will also hear precisely no difference. In fact you can go as high as 384KHz.

JRiver is an interesting tool to realise the practical effects of digital processing and hear through the BS. If you understand Nyquist/Shannon etc you realise that the practical effect of anything over 16bit 44.1KHz is likely to be inaudible.

I personally think the differences, where they are audible, are down to mastering but I could be wrong.

It's very possible. If the 24bit version is mastered differently that could make all the difference.

And Yes I understand Nyquist etc.. Most recently I've seen that pertaining to the top resolution that can be resolved with a lens at different apertures.

Right now I'm just trying to get my bearings on things as I've been out of the audio scene for quite a while.

I've heard that most people can't hear any difference at any bitrate higher than 320kbps MPEG3 16bit 44.1kHz and even if they can it is extremely minimal and not enough to make one audio track sound good and another sound bad.

I'm pretty skeptical about a lot of things because of the amount of belief in astrology and magic regarding audio which discredits a lot of what I read. The placebo effect is so strong in some circles that it makes it hard to tell fact from fiction.

I walking into this curious what I will hear and I'm not on a holy question to find the perfect stereo, I just want my system to be big grin on my face. Everything past that is gravy!

What I know is that the OPPO 105D is going to make listening to digital music very convenient and it should very cleanly drive my amplifier. I also know that my amplifier should very comfortably push the ML Ethos speakers. Past that this is all going just be a lot of fun!