These ten albums will work pretty much regardless of the hardware and equipment you have so they can be recommended without concerns over whether they will work or not. This list is far from exhaustive and it has no DSD titles on it. There’s a bewildering selection of choice available in terms of genres and sample rates and some of it you don’t even need to pay for. On a more basic level, the effort of creating these files means that more effort goes into their mastering which in turn generally improves performance too.Īs such, there’s no better time to dip a toe in the waters of Hi-Res.

We’re coming out of the compressed music era – the limits that existed on bandwidth and storage no longer exist so the ‘big deal’ is we’re back up to CD sized files for streaming.īut if there is no technical need to have more bandwidth and information than CD, why bother? The answers to this are an article in themselves but the long and the short of it is that the extra information – if handled and decoded correctly – can be used to create a signal that we perceive to be more natural and less processed. The second is that music has first had to go backwards to go forwards.

A well mastered CD can sound staggeringly good and the notional thresholds of human hearing are something that are well within reach of a 16/44.1 file.

The first is that as benchmarks go, it’s a pretty solid one. This varies slightly from product to product but one characteristic is present on pretty much anything we test and that is that it can handle resolutions and sampling rates that are far in advance of that on a CD – a thirty plus year old benchmark that we seem curiously reluctant to part with.

Hd audio songs