Media Choice?

I don’t think there are enough HDCDs around that this would be a good option for building a collection.

Cds are generally cheap and plentiful right now so that’s a plus. However, many cds have been dynamically squashed. They are loud all the way through, no soft sections and loud sections. That can make finding good sounding cds difficult depending on your taste in music.

I think that streaming can sound as good as cds or better, and streaming appears to be the future of digital audio. However, you don’t own a copy of the music you stream, so if your streaming service disappears or removes certain albums or artists for whatever reason, you no longer have access to that music.

So I would try to find on cd the music you want to own and keep forever.  Buying downloads is also an option.

Resources for finding good sounding cds are the Steve Hoffman Music Forums and the Dynamic Range Database. Once you decide which mastering of a particular album you want you can find cds listed by mastering on Discogs, but check with the seller before buying because sellers don’t always list their cds under the correct listing.

I also recommend you stream because it gives you access to a tremendous amount of music, it sounds great to me and the sound quality will probably improve beyond cd as time goes on, and the scenario where you lose the music you want to listen to may not happen.

So, I am going to stream regardless. However (in the event there are other options such as downloading files), I am assuming that playing a Flac file from the server transport will sound better than the same resolution streamed via a streaming transport. Is that correct? 

Is it also correct that a 24/192 Flac will sound better than a 20/44.1 HDCD ripped to Flac, then played via the server? 

Thanks all! 

TBC: True HDCD encoded disks needs to be properly decoded somewhere, either in software (either storage or playback) or in the DAC. There are also a number of false HDCD marked recordings which while using the digital signature, did not actually take advantage of any of the advanced features of HDCD. Still, storage and compute is
cheap. Personally I scanned all my FLAC and decoded those that were marked to 24/44.

The next part of this is how DAC’s sound now. They sound much much better with Redbook than they did 15 years ago. It’s much harder to hear a difference between 16/44 and 24/96 with the best DACs, but oversampling and upsampling to 88 kHz and above still show promise. Of course, some DACs sound very different at 16/44 but my point is that it’s no longer justified. I mean it’s almost as if they want to prove they are high end by maintaining a delta between 16/44 and 24/96.  Much of this probably has to do with hyper-accurate clocks becoming cheap.


Another positive outcome that has happened is asynchronous USB. Letting the DAC control the rate of data coming to it instead of say, a CD spinner with all the mechanical issues that can cause jitter, has really levelled the playing field.  On the one hand, the input is more jitter resistant, on the other, USB is now asynchronous, so for the audiophile things have continued to improve regardless of your source.


The main lesson I want to say about all of this is that you may be splitting hairs that don’t matter as much as the convenience of access and playback. If you aren’t blown away by Tidal, or CD playback or a High rez version being clearly superior, maybe it’s’ best to just sit back and enjoy what you have without attempting to find the best?

- E

There's no one format that you can depend on for best sound.  Sound quality varies from album to album so much that how well the album was recorded is the most important factor in sound quality.  From there, how well it was converted to various formats varies also.  You have to listen to various albums in various formats on a case by case basis if you want to find the best.

You can find discussions of sound quality and formats here:

https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/forums/music-corner.2/

but it 's not easy to find the best sounding version of each album.

I also expect the sound quality of streaming to continue to improve because it's the dominant format now and will probably become more dominant as time goes on, but again, you don't own the music.