Does HiRez really sound better?

Geoffkait, That's interesting because even back in the 70s cassette was known as a lofi medium, only 8 tracks were considered worse. You had to use dolby processing to decrease tape hiss, which also removed a lot of the high frequencies, or one could listen with the tape hiss on self recorded cassettes. Prerecorded cassettes definitely were not considered audiophile grade recordings.

I think some people just like a higher noise floor on their recordings, and I have no problem with that at all.

To answer the original question, Hi rez can sound better than cd but does not always. I think we will see significant improvements in both cd and hi rez sound for years to come.

"04-02-15: Geoffkait
Actually, as I understand it cassette tape has higher resolution than Redbook CD. That would probably help explain my preference, but also the sheer musicality, you know, things like sweetness, warmth and air."

There's really no reason why you can't be right on that. I think many people forget that resolution isn't fixed with analogue formats, like they are with digital. You buy a better cassette player and you can increase the resolution without changing the format. Digital products don't work like that.

Z Man, not only that but for CDs that were remastered from the original master analog tapes, I kinda doubt digitizing he thing will result in higher resolution than what you started out with -- the original master tape. Duh!

:-)

For those listeners sensitive to pitch accuracy and consistency, the wow and flutter and overall speed variability of even the best cassettes is easily audible and very annoying. IMHO there is no way a violin or piano can sound truly natural on cassette, even if the comparison is only to RB CD.

What a pretty thought, that we will see significant improvements in CD and hi Rez for years to come. It appears to me that in fact the quality of CDs has steadily gone down the tubes ever since they started compressing the music for some hare brained reason. As a matter if fact generally speaking the dynamic range of new and remastered CDs has in some cases gone from a value of 15 to a value of 8 or 9 according to the Official Dynamic Range Data Base.