Buying from HDTracks - optimal bitrate

WARNING - Drunk rambling incoming*

The optimal bitrate for all music is the bitrate at which it was recorded. IF it's down-sampled, you're losing detail, and if it's up-sampled then you're at the mercy of whatever up-sampling algorithm they used, and it can be pretty shitty. Better yet, find if your band has a bandcamp or something, and get your music there and cut HDTracks out of the equation. It's probably much cheaper that way.

CD-quality masters sound bad for two reasons: They were poorly mastered (very common), or your playback chain is using the CD-standard brickwall filter (one of the great unwinnable debates of modern audio). The brickwall filter is bad for reason that have been beaten to death elsewhere, but it basically causes artifacts in the time domain. It's an ongoing debate as to if these artifacts are actually audible, but from a philosophical standpoint i don't like the thought that such a crap filter was used. The higher sampling rate audio has different filters in their standards, which are much more gradual and thus have much less an effect on audio in the time domain. You decide if this matters to you.

The point of the multibit stuff isn't that it makes your music magically better. It's goal is to reproduce the music as it was mastered. The big thing I noticed going from an Uberfrost to a Yggdrasil was that the Yggdrasil is much less forgiving on shitty masters. Weird stuff like where effects applied to electronic music mess up the staging, where stuff flattens the soundstage to a 2d movie screen, etc. are a lot more obvious. Mike Moffat has a post somewhere where he talks about he doesn't really know what to do about electronic music because of stuff like this. If I wasn't lazy, I'd mess around in Reason or Maschine and try to catalog what various techniques and effects did to the staging of samples. Maybe after the election this year, when I have free time again.

 

Where's this computer audiophile site?

 

http://www.computeraudiophile.com/