HDTracks Downloads vs Qobuz/Tidal Streaming

[Jud]

1. You can buy downloads from Qobuz (Tidal also I'm sure, but I happen to be a happy Qobuz subscriber).

 

2. When I bought from HDTracks, they gave me quite a hassle about re-downloading if there was an error on my end  - or theirs, of which there have been some doozies, e.g., the Who's Tommy missing three tracks.  I can't think of another download vendor that does this (unless they've changed), so why go through the bother?

 

3. As has been mentioned, if you really think the download will sound better, a streaming+download service offers the opportunity to listen and determine whether it's a download you really want to buy, rather than guessing from 30 second snippets.

[Jud]

On 1/4/2023 at 10:20 AM, firedog said:

You need to set it up so you don't know which one is being played and make sure the volume is set the same for all playback. 

Otherwise it's not a good test.

 

Since echoic memory (that is, our memory for sounds) lasts about 4 seconds, even after all that it's not a good test.

 

What is a good test is to use well recorded mono, for example the Beach Boys' Pet Sounds (or create mono from well recorded stereo - you can do this with Audacity), then use Paul Kane's DeltaWave Comparator ( https://deltaw.org ) to listen to both tracks simultaneously.  Switch ears and see whether your preference (if any) switches too.

 

This unfortunately won't work for streaming vs. download, nor for FLAC vs. WAV (though it will for original WAV vs. FLAC that's expanded to WAV).

 

One other thought about eliminating any nagging doubts regarding compression (even if it's all in your head, why be bothered?): AIFF is an available uncompressed download format from Qobuz, and it's more easily amenable to good metadata tagging than WAV files are.

 

 

[Jud]

15 hours ago, cpcat said:

So qobuz doesn’t offer WAV downloads?

 

 

I don’t know, they might. I have all my stuff in AIFF, so that’s what I’m familiar with.

 

15 hours ago, cpcat said:

   AIFF is fine though as long as dbpoweramp does conversion from AIFF to uncompressed FLAC?  I’m pretty sure it does, will have to check.

Don’t use it so wouldn’t know. If it doesn’t there are other apps that do (on Windows, MediaHuman is free and I think it works well).

[Jud]

4 minutes ago, Apollo said:

I converted everything to losless AIFF by means of dbPoweramp batch convertor, as this format was already supported on all platforms that I was considering to use (no Linux at that time).

Anything I have wanted to use in Linux has supported AIFF. (Didn’t know if you were implying anything different, just thought I would mention it.)