Is HD Music a scam? A lot of it, probably.
One day I was wandering through the aisles of a thrift shop looking at all the classical music CDs no one wants anymore (or were wanted by someone who died) and it occurred to me to ask: is 44KHz 16-bit "Red Book" really good enough for all music?
The vulgar crowd screamed "Hell, yes!" with the sad reality that for 20+ years crap-MP3 is still the only near-universally playable audio format on just about every platform, even Hefty Mart's cheapest car radio. For convenience, an entire generation accepted quality quite noticeably worse than Red Book CD as good 'nuf.
For a long time, I refurbished iPods. Even long after they fell out of fashion, I just thought they looked neat while Sandisk and other players all looked like junk. I still like the look of classic, pre-touch iPods, and while they sound great with Apple lossless, the source material is still Red Book CDs.
Then I found out about Sony's long-obsolete SACD disks. I got myself an old Sony-branded blueray player and wow! Most classical SACDs I've listened to sound vastly superior to Red Book CDs. Popular music, however, is a totally different story: old classic rock albums from the 1970s re-released on SACD sound the same to slightly better than Red Book. Two particularly crappy examples are Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and Blue Oyster Cult's Agents of Fortune; both sound pretty much the same as the old CDs.
As for insanely high bit rate PCM and DSD files sold in online stores today, I'm not sure there is any significant improvement over DSD64 (SACD).
Way back in 2000ish, I didn't look carefully into SACD, assuming it was just the same thing as Red Book just with bigger samples (20bit, maybe 24bit?) and a higher sampling rate (maybe 88KHz?). Turns out, the data on an SACD is a totally different beast: DSD. Not PCM at all, but pulse density modulation (PDM.) There's a whole lot of unscientific jibber-jabber about whether DSD or really high bitrate PCM (352.8kHz 24bit, "DXD") sounds better. In my own testing, I think there are 3 things more important than whether the music is stored on DSD64 (SACD), Red Book (CD), or insanely HD (DSD256, DXD):
1. Quality of headphones or speakers
2. Quality of your DSP
3. Quality of the original source
#1, I use Grado SR-80 headphones. They're open so you don't get the sea-shell effect, which in my opinion makes music sound tinny. They also do not have thunderous bass, which IMHO, sounds like mush.
#2: Your laptop or phone's soundcard is rubbish. It's probably resampling whatever is thrown at it to whatever its DSP's native sample depth/rate is. I don't have golden ears, but el cheapo laptop/phone soundcards do a really bad job of resampling and it is not at all easy to figure out what they're doing. The solution? Buy a cheap ~$100 USB DAC. iFi's cheapest models, "hip-dac" and "Zen," sound vastly superior to any laptop or phone I have ever owned. Both DACs are supported by the linux kernel and mpd.
#3: You have no control over this but you can use spek (search github for it) to examine the data, when you suspect your newly purchased hd music file is resampled crap. AFAIK, NativeDSD is the only online music shop that is at least a little honest (they could add a bit more detail) about where their music comes from. I've tried various free sampler albums from other shops and they don't sound that great. Examination of crappy-sounding files with spek also shows strange artifacts like constant tones at high frequencies while others show tell-tales like nothing above 16kHz, or nothing above 22kHz. Once again, I don't have bat ears, but I've noticed that files that just sound a bit off usually show these artifacts: they've probably been converted from some other older format or come from dubious sources to be resold as "HD Music."
PS: You might notice I don't mention streaming services. That's because I like to own my data and store it on my own ZFS-backed storage. All part of the fun.
The vulgar crowd screamed "Hell, yes!" with the sad reality that for 20+ years crap-MP3 is still the only near-universally playable audio format on just about every platform, even Hefty Mart's cheapest car radio. For convenience, an entire generation accepted quality quite noticeably worse than Red Book CD as good 'nuf.
For a long time, I refurbished iPods. Even long after they fell out of fashion, I just thought they looked neat while Sandisk and other players all looked like junk. I still like the look of classic, pre-touch iPods, and while they sound great with Apple lossless, the source material is still Red Book CDs.
Then I found out about Sony's long-obsolete SACD disks. I got myself an old Sony-branded blueray player and wow! Most classical SACDs I've listened to sound vastly superior to Red Book CDs. Popular music, however, is a totally different story: old classic rock albums from the 1970s re-released on SACD sound the same to slightly better than Red Book. Two particularly crappy examples are Bowie's Ziggy Stardust and Blue Oyster Cult's Agents of Fortune; both sound pretty much the same as the old CDs.
As for insanely high bit rate PCM and DSD files sold in online stores today, I'm not sure there is any significant improvement over DSD64 (SACD).
Way back in 2000ish, I didn't look carefully into SACD, assuming it was just the same thing as Red Book just with bigger samples (20bit, maybe 24bit?) and a higher sampling rate (maybe 88KHz?). Turns out, the data on an SACD is a totally different beast: DSD. Not PCM at all, but pulse density modulation (PDM.) There's a whole lot of unscientific jibber-jabber about whether DSD or really high bitrate PCM (352.8kHz 24bit, "DXD") sounds better. In my own testing, I think there are 3 things more important than whether the music is stored on DSD64 (SACD), Red Book (CD), or insanely HD (DSD256, DXD):
1. Quality of headphones or speakers
2. Quality of your DSP
3. Quality of the original source
#1, I use Grado SR-80 headphones. They're open so you don't get the sea-shell effect, which in my opinion makes music sound tinny. They also do not have thunderous bass, which IMHO, sounds like mush.
#2: Your laptop or phone's soundcard is rubbish. It's probably resampling whatever is thrown at it to whatever its DSP's native sample depth/rate is. I don't have golden ears, but el cheapo laptop/phone soundcards do a really bad job of resampling and it is not at all easy to figure out what they're doing. The solution? Buy a cheap ~$100 USB DAC. iFi's cheapest models, "hip-dac" and "Zen," sound vastly superior to any laptop or phone I have ever owned. Both DACs are supported by the linux kernel and mpd.
#3: You have no control over this but you can use spek (search github for it) to examine the data, when you suspect your newly purchased hd music file is resampled crap. AFAIK, NativeDSD is the only online music shop that is at least a little honest (they could add a bit more detail) about where their music comes from. I've tried various free sampler albums from other shops and they don't sound that great. Examination of crappy-sounding files with spek also shows strange artifacts like constant tones at high frequencies while others show tell-tales like nothing above 16kHz, or nothing above 22kHz. Once again, I don't have bat ears, but I've noticed that files that just sound a bit off usually show these artifacts: they've probably been converted from some other older format or come from dubious sources to be resold as "HD Music."
PS: You might notice I don't mention streaming services. That's because I like to own my data and store it on my own ZFS-backed storage. All part of the fun.
