Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, Captain Ned
TheEmrys wrote:I hate to break it to you, but even CD's aren't always the best place to get lossless. You'd have to move up to the pretty niche Super Audio CD. You'd also need some pretty high end components to support it. Entry-level speakers for that sort of quality is going to be in the $3-5k range.
If you are looking for digital downloadable, you need to find something that supports DSD instead of the vanilla PCM. http://www.2l.no sell DSD and DXD as well.
TheEmrys wrote:I hate to break it to you, but even CD's aren't always the best place to get lossless. You'd have to move up to the pretty niche Super Audio CD. You'd also need some pretty high end components to support it. Entry-level speakers for that sort of quality is going to be in the $3-5k range.
If you are looking for digital downloadable, you need to find something that supports DSD instead of the vanilla PCM. http://www.2l.no sell DSD and DXD as well.
Philldoe wrote:Depending on the band in question, you may be able to get the source audio from their website as part of a digital album purchase.
cynan wrote:I know of HDtracks. They specialize in 24 bit, 88 or 96khz (whereas a CD is 16 bit/44khz). However, the selection ins't huge and there's not a lot of contemporary stuff. Plus you pay pretty much top dollar.
In some cases those 320 kbps mp3s that you download from places like itunes may contain more information than a 320 kbps mp3 (or potentially even lossless formats) you rip from a CD at home as a lot of those mp3s are encoded directly from higher bitrate digital masters. However, I've never spent any time doing comparisons myself, so I don't know if they'red be much of an audible difference. The point being, that depending on the music, settling for downloading mp3s from places like Itunes doesn't necessarily mean you are sacrificing quality vs a CD.
@ TheEmry's: Wow! I've never heard of Direct Stream Digital audio format before. Does this really make an audible difference? Or there any recordings of popular music that are available in true DSD? (From a brief look at Wikipedia, it mentions that even most SACDs are not true DSD because they mixed in PCM due to the ubiquitousness of PCM in studio software tools... Are the downloads available on that website pure DSD? Or could they also have been mixed in PCM?