Sound Quality of red book CDs vs.streaming

Has anyone else noticed that quite a few hi res downloads are aggressively compressed? It seems inescapable, even SACDs, and Japanese SHD CDs and Blu Ray. I mean, what’s the point?

Dear geoffkait,

you are 100% right and I have the same experiences. That is why Hi-res does not garantee you anything. There are also many poor DSD and MQA recordings as well.

No format can ever garantee you anything. It costs me a lot of time to find good new music and in a good quality. That is why I spend 3-4 hours each single week. There is no other way to find it.

@rvpiano-re the question of master tapes as a source, my impression is that most of the majors will not let the master tape out of the door, and usually supply a flat transfer on hi-rez. There are of course exceptions- the "audiophile labels" like Acoustic Sounds and a few others (Classic, ORG, MoFi in some cases) do get access to the tapes, probably because of long working relationships with the labels. For digital streaming, I suspect that if the end product is a digital file, there is even less likelihood that a master tape was used as a source, and which master? A safety? A copy made for a particular market may sound different than another. It’s the stuff that keeps record hounds searching, comparing notes and pressings. I don’t know the answer as it applies to streaming, which was one of my questions earlier in this thread- whether the streaming platforms identify the source and mastering.
What I wrote above really applies to older recordings where tape was the medium. If you are a Steve Wilson fan, you’ll know that he remixes a lot of this stuff (mainly prog rock) in the digital domain using the multitracks and eschews ’mastering’ as such, believing that his mixes are the final product without more EQ (apart from what may be necessary to meet an RIAA curve for the LP releases). Some of that stuff is pretty good if you are a fan of this type of music.

Audioengr,

My question is do the streaming companies buy the tracks from the record companies directly, and if they do is it via hard drive transfer or software?
Or is there a distributor (middle man?)

I did compare the same music at the same format and quality from different websites. Even here you find differences.

HDtracks also gives you different freq. sample rates. But often the music is only avaliable at one sample rate.

The same music I bought from Qobuz was often a lot better the same music from HDtracks.

Even the same music I bought from Qobuz was almost in all situations better than the ripped music of the same album. In my world the best quality always counts. And all the rest have no meaning at all.