High-Resolution Downloads to die for…

[wisnon]

As a classical buff, you should be truly into SACD/DSD.

 

In Geneva there was a shop that sold Pentatone SACDs for CHF10- each, but most have gone. I know the Brahms Beaux Arts Trio from the 1950s went like hot cakes. He does have Praga Digitalis, Corviello(sp?) and one other SACD brand there...

 

As for rendering piano faithfully, the Heil (Air velocity transformer) driver is the best I heard, so far.

[wisnon]

Heil's Air Motion Transformer is a fascinating driver. The concept is really quite old, I've known it since I started building loudspeakers as a teenager. The real crux building loudspeakers is not (no longer) the availability of high-tech drivers, but achieving an overall coherent sound reproduction, that is, resonance-free frequency response, rise and settling time, time and phase linearity across the whole spectrum (ideally beyond). As far as integrating it into a concept taking into account all of the afore-mentioned, it is hardly surprising one rarely sees it applied using its full theoretical frequency response anymore. Also, whether or not the AMT is particularly suited to the reproduction of classical music is debatable. But we're digressing.

 

More in keeping with the thread subject, the problem of high-resolution formats, including SACD/DSD, is that literally, 99.9% of the music true "classical buffs" cherish, is unavailable in any such lofty format - as a matter of fact, much of it is unavailable in any format worth listening to.

 

My personally compiled list of classical recordings worth investigating (originally started as a "favourites" list for an inquisitive friend of mine) is currently 216 pages long (at roughly one entry per line, between 50'000 and 75'000 entries). It's depressing to see how little of it is available in any digital high-resolution format.

 

Also, I've yet to be convinced that DSD should be considered the ideal format. As one violin maker once told me, one must wonder why the industry keeps insisting on digital formats using 44.1 kS/s sample frequency multiples - a mystery understandably to anyone who spent a lifetime perfecting their secret varnish recipes trying to attenuate if not suppress "ugly-sounding" resonances and their dividers and multiples.

 

Greetings from Switzerland, David.

 

David,

 

I can tell you that the Lampizator Dac maker felt similarly to your post above and then when I encouraged him to design a DSD Dac and he heard his prototype!!!! Complete change of midst. Dont confuse SACD with DSD. Many masters of all formats are now stored as bitstream files!!!