The Modern DAC killed High Resolution Music - has Stereophile proven it?

Erick

What if someone came up with a killer MP3 player that extracted every single iota of audio information from an mp3 stream.  Would the value of 16/44 then be diminished?

@mahler123

That’s a different situation. MP3 as we know is lossy, but put it another way, what if some one had a lossy compression algorithm which sounded 90% as good as a high rez download, for 1/10th the cost?

Would that not alter the market and depress the value of the high rez recording?

Going back to my original post though, let's say CD playback until the 2000's was half as good as it is today, but high resolution music stayed the same. Can High Resolution still command the premium it used to?

To defend my thesis a little more, even if we personally like High Rez music above all others, it always faced an uphill battle. Even lossless music has barely gone mainstream.

MQA 20 years ago would have seemed like a godsend, but now, with better DACs and cheaper Internet it seems like much less important.

The argument of "can I hear a difference with High Resolution Files?" is different than mine. I'm arguing that as DACs have improved, the reasons for the average audiophile to buy high resolution music has diminshed.

Tidal, Quboz and Amazon seem to have demonstrated that non-MP3 based services can survive, but it's getting harder to sell 96/24.

How about considering the cost of Hi Rez files?  One download can cost more than one month of Tidal (Hi-Fi/Masters sub for $20).  Recent purchase of a Mytek Brooklyn+ leaves me as satisfied via Tidal as my CD rips upsampled via JRiver to 24/192 or DSD.  The Brooklyn also does surprisingly well with Redbook.  I do only have several Hi-Rez files so my experience is limited, but to me the cost is prohibitive and I have discovered so much new music through Tidal.

Erik,

I think you are "spot on".

Someone in my audio club who knows more about the "nuts and bolts" of DAC design than I'll ever know once said that the reason why hi-res files sounded better several years ago was that the DACs of the day had "quantization errors" and by processing a hi-res file, those errors were typically way beyond the upper limit of our hearing, so filtering them on the back end didn't have much of a negative side effect.  He said that today's DACs have pretty much "solved" the "quantization error" problem.

I must say that, when I'm streaming music (from Qobuz), I usually select the hi-res file, not because it's hi-res, but I do suspect that they are newer masters and sometimes do sound more "musical" compared to the 44.1/16 files, but not always.

Your point is well taken, that the newer generation of DACs are so much better than one's from several years ago, that "regular" CD quality does successfully rival the sound quality of those hi-res files.