haltny
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- Jan 21, 2014
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I recently read an article all about something called 'the loudness wars'. Without getting technical, because I am not a technical person, it is something to do with the compression of sounds on modern music and supposedly 'remastered' music.
I had never heard of this before so decided to do a comparison. I did this comparison with Rod Stewart's song 'Sailing' from his 'Atlantic Crossing' Album. This was played from Quobuz via USB direct to my Cayin CS55-A valve amp, which has a very high-quality built-in DAC.
I also did the same comparison played via my laptop listening via Philips Fidelio X2HR headphones with Cyrus Soundkey and finally, I played the song via Spotify Premium 320kbps via my Cambridge Audio 851N via RCA to my amp.
The first song I played was from the 2008 'Atlantic Crossing' album based on the original CD and was 16bit 44.1 KHz CD quality.
The second song I played was from the 2009 'Atlantic Crossing Delux' 'Remastered' release. It was also 16bit 44.1 KHz CD quality.
Wow is all I can say. I assumed that the newer 'Remastered' song would sound much better. Nope. The newer 'Remastered' version was awful. By direct comparison to the original, it sounded completely flat. Like someone had removed everything that makes the song sound enjoyable, leaving this dull-sounding, uninspiring song that made me want to turn it off, rather than listen to it. The difference was not slight, it was night and day.
The 320kbps Spotify version via my 851N sounded equally as good as the CD-quality version, to the point I could not discern any noticeable difference in quality. In fact, the 320kbps Spotify '2008' album version sounded much better than the CD-quality '2009 Remastered' version played via Quobuz. Thus my conclusion, a poorer quality stream with a far better quality recording sounded much better than a poorer quality recording at a supposedly better quality stream.
This got me thinking. With this modern craze of 'High Res' music and 'MQA' are we all simply being hoodwinked by the music industry into paying for something new, which is actually worse than the original?
I had never heard of this before so decided to do a comparison. I did this comparison with Rod Stewart's song 'Sailing' from his 'Atlantic Crossing' Album. This was played from Quobuz via USB direct to my Cayin CS55-A valve amp, which has a very high-quality built-in DAC.
I also did the same comparison played via my laptop listening via Philips Fidelio X2HR headphones with Cyrus Soundkey and finally, I played the song via Spotify Premium 320kbps via my Cambridge Audio 851N via RCA to my amp.
The first song I played was from the 2008 'Atlantic Crossing' album based on the original CD and was 16bit 44.1 KHz CD quality.
The second song I played was from the 2009 'Atlantic Crossing Delux' 'Remastered' release. It was also 16bit 44.1 KHz CD quality.
Wow is all I can say. I assumed that the newer 'Remastered' song would sound much better. Nope. The newer 'Remastered' version was awful. By direct comparison to the original, it sounded completely flat. Like someone had removed everything that makes the song sound enjoyable, leaving this dull-sounding, uninspiring song that made me want to turn it off, rather than listen to it. The difference was not slight, it was night and day.
The 320kbps Spotify version via my 851N sounded equally as good as the CD-quality version, to the point I could not discern any noticeable difference in quality. In fact, the 320kbps Spotify '2008' album version sounded much better than the CD-quality '2009 Remastered' version played via Quobuz. Thus my conclusion, a poorer quality stream with a far better quality recording sounded much better than a poorer quality recording at a supposedly better quality stream.
This got me thinking. With this modern craze of 'High Res' music and 'MQA' are we all simply being hoodwinked by the music industry into paying for something new, which is actually worse than the original?