I agree that hi-rez needs to stay hi-rez (a reason I own hundreds of SACD and DVD-Audio titles). My point in the opening post was poorly stated. I meant that a 16/44 source, keep it out of the redbook RS process....but as you stated, hell, that means we wouldn't have to stoop to 16/44.1. Good point.
Downloads that aren't ripped from cd's
The Memory Player, from Nova, has as part of it's value proposition the benefit of listening to redbook after the supposedly nasty Reed Solomon error correction data bits are removed from the signal path. It got me thinking; are there downloads out there (Music Giant, Linn, HDD) that come direcctly from master tapes or consoles that do not involve having to carry the theoretical baggage of the typical redbook hard disc rip, namely the cd format and all it's error correction, jitter, etc.
Media servers and hd playback (Sonos, Squeezebox, etc.) have some real benefits outside simple convenience, such as possibly less jitter, less noisy environments, fewer spinning motors, etc. But they typically play back ripped cd music, albeit in FLAC or other lossless file formats. If you assume the cd rip includes the Reed Solomon and other gremlins, its garbage in/garbage out. If downloads were from more native sources (tape, DSD consoles, etc.) and put on large flash drives wouldn't they potentially sound as good as it gets (for 16/44.1)?
Media servers and hd playback (Sonos, Squeezebox, etc.) have some real benefits outside simple convenience, such as possibly less jitter, less noisy environments, fewer spinning motors, etc. But they typically play back ripped cd music, albeit in FLAC or other lossless file formats. If you assume the cd rip includes the Reed Solomon and other gremlins, its garbage in/garbage out. If downloads were from more native sources (tape, DSD consoles, etc.) and put on large flash drives wouldn't they potentially sound as good as it gets (for 16/44.1)?
3 responses Add your response
