How eClassical.com could get a lot of hero worship and money from me

[wgscott]

Gregor Samsa in another thread posted the best idea I have heard in a long long time:

 

He suggested that eClassical.com post a sample Audacity fft spectrum with each download, so the potential purchaser could check the veracity of the high resolution claims.

 

Given that buying high res music can be a real crap-shoot, I think this would be a HUGE benefit to potential consumers, and thus a major inducement to purchase.

 

I hereby declare I will put my money where my mouth is, and would regard Robert as a true hero and innovator for doing this.

 

Note to Robert: There are a number of us who would be happy to advise on how to do this. I would certainly do so (for free) and the main part is that it is very easy to do and straightforward. Take a look at some of the threads in this section of the forum for examples...

 

[esldude]

Damn! That is a good idea, and so simple. Gregor Samsa sure deserves recognition for his recognition of this.

 

If we could get one Hi-rez purveyor to do this, maybe the others would in time have to follow suit or be more forthcoming with provenance to compete.

 

Sure is a crap shoot with HDtracks. They more than anyone needs to do this. But really they all do.

 

[wgscott]

Someone brought up in another thread that most of these downloads are 24-bit, 44.1kHz sampled, so Audacity ffts aren't going to tell us much. It still would be nice to make this kind of "what you see is what you get" information the norm. It would also be nice to see whether there is clipping in the waveform plot, so you can get an idea of whether something is a loudness war casualty (again, probably not a big concern for classical).

 

[wgscott]

Someone brought up in another thread that most of these downloads are 24-bit, 44.1kHz sampled, so Audacity ffts aren't going to tell us much. It still would be nice to make this kind of "what you see is what you get" information the norm. It would also be nice to see whether there is clipping in the waveform plot, so you can get an idea of whether something is a loudness war casualty (again, probably not a big concern for classical).

 

[wgscott]

So here is an interesting example:

 

http://www.eclassical.com/24bit/beethoven-piano-sonatas-nos-16-18.html

 

I bought this from HDtracks and it was upsampled (see separate thread for details):

 

 

It would be nice to see this to know if it will be different. So I decided to purchase the first track of the same thing. It is different, but it seems to have its own anomalies:

 

 

[AudioDoctor]

I think Chris is playing around with the manner in which attached photos/files appear in threads.

 

[Julf]

"Someone brought up in another thread that most of these downloads are 24-bit, 44.1kHz sampled, so Audacity ffts aren't going to tell us much."

 

Absolutely true. But at least it helps us with 96/24 and 192/24 versions of upsampled CD/Red book and badly resampled DSD stuff.

 

 

 

[Russell_L]

I've posted at least a couple of Audacity spectra of greater-than-44.1kHz files purchased from eClassical, and they've proven to be the real deal. If eClassical isn't willing to post spectrum images on their site, perhaps we can devote a thread solely to eClassical files here on CA. (And by the same token, we could have threads for The Classical Shop, Linn, Qobuz, and others.) I purchase pretty regularly from these sites and would love to see something like this.

 

Russell