EST Live in London (24/96) - most likely upsampled 48khz album

[Musicophile]

I just bought the newly released Live in London by the great Esbjörn Svensson Trio.

 

An otherwise excellent album (and cheap with €5.99 Qobuz Sublime discounted price).

 

The only thing is, it is not 24/96, but pretty clearly 24/48. DR is good though 10-14. So no reason not to buy, just be aware that the format is misleading.

 

[Musicophile]

15 minutes ago, rodrigaj said:

@Musicophile

When looking at the graph, how do you determine a DR of 10 - 14?

 

It‘s not in there (Musicscope uses a different DR measure), the DR values are calculated by Audirvana. 

[Musicophile]

4 minutes ago, rodrigaj said:

 

Thanks!

I'm a relatively new A+ user. How do I see DR values in Audirvana? I've looked through the manual and nothing jumped out at me.

 

It’s a function called calculate replay gain that you can activate in the album info. It’s used if you want to harmonize the loudness but it also fills the DR field of the A+ database which you can show for example in lost mode. 

[Musicophile]

12 hours ago, EuroChamp said:

highresaudio offers a 24/48 version only - and no 24/96 version.

I wonder who does the upsampling - qobuz?

I’d be surprised but don’t know. I’m still waiting to hear back from their customer service. 

[Musicophile]

1 hour ago, EuroChamp said:

 

Would be great if you could let us know about their answer. The album is really good and I want to buy it, but in the most native resolution. It looks like 24/48 is the right one.

They just asked me if I had a screenshot, so I shared it with them (plus the information that competition is selling a different version).

 

I'm pretty sure you're safe buying the 24/48 from HRA, as you clearly have information up to 24khz, and Musicscope indicated bits being used above 16.

It's a really nice album by the way, I have a review in the making.

[Musicophile]

20 minutes ago, EuroChamp said:

HRA is an option of course. Would prefer Qobuz, because I am a Sublime+ customer.

I will wait ... and for your review

Well, I guess you can buy the current 24/96 and just get some empty bytes.... But I'll keep you posted.

[Musicophile]

1 hour ago, EuroChamp said:

 

according to my knowledge a change from 48 kHz to 96 kHz is resampling. A change from 16 to 24 bit were indeed some empty bytes.

You're correct obviously.

 

In the meantime, Qobuz admitted that it looks fishy and are reaching out to their supplier, and have offered me a free download in compensation. 

 

They should rather hurry up fixing this, it is now on their no. 1 of their download charts.

[Musicophile]

On 5/16/2018 at 3:19 PM, EuroChamp said:

HRA is an option of course. Would prefer Qobuz, because I am a Sublime+ customer.

I will wait ... and for your review

Just published my review here: https://musicophilesblog.com/2018/05/21/esbjorn-svensson-trio-live-in-london-a-review/

 

Still haven't heard back from Qobuz after they reached out to their supplier (and they are still selling the 24/96).

[Musicophile]

6 hours ago, Em2016 said:

 

We would hope Qobuz themselves are checking the files they receive from their suppliers... not leaving it to the end customer to find things look fishy...

 

yeah, you'd hope so. I guess it's a question of volume, and this has been my first bad apple in quite a while now (I check all of my downloads directly after purchase, and buy 2-3 per month). Other industries use similar mechanisms too (e.g. if you find this cheaper anywhere, we'll match the price....)

 

HRA is much more diligent on this side, but then again, their catalog is smaller.

[Musicophile]

9 hours ago, mansr said:

A while back, I bought a 5-CD set of Debussy piano works from Qobuz. Two of them were clearly upsampled. Now it's piano, so there's no high-frequency content to begin with. I only got the hi-res version in the hopes that the 24-bit release would be the least mangled.

Which pianist was this? And did you flag it to Qobuz?

[Musicophile]

5 minutes ago, mansr said:

This set: https://www.qobuz.com/gb-en/album/claude-debussy-complete-works-for-piano-jean-efflam-bavouzet/0095115174326

 

How would I do that? Do they care?

Send a message to their customer service. In my case, they reached out to their supplier (and I got a free album for alerting them).

I have that box actually, which ones are the upsampled ones?

[Musicophile]

10 minutes ago, mansr said:

The first two.

Thanks. I never checked the entire box as I started buying vol 4 initially which was ok and only bought the fulll box later.