I have tried TIDAL as they were first on the block with hi res streaming. A few things made me stop. 1, I cant buy the music from them and 2, MQA, it is a scam that made the music sound worse, IMO.
Qobuz lets me redownload if I were somehow able to lose my local and offsite backups as well, and they provide album details and high quality cover art. They also have a free trial if you want to try it out.
Talking about re-download, Beatport removed a song and eventhough I have bought it, I can’t download it anymore.
How do file sizes stack up for you ~per hour of audio. Been considering upgrading my CD collection and seeing if I want to just do top releases or or stagger them before making a NAS
No to everything.
Highest quality audio slow ips tape. Best digital sound format is DSD not many device’s support it.
for example.
the music you can get on places like this.
Well, a CD is up to 700MB at full 16/44 resolution.
A 24/192 album is 2.6 GB.
A DSD256 album is 6.4 GB
(*an album of different length will be a different size, I just picked albums I have at these bit rates.)
I don’t know how much that is per hour. I have all my music in uncompressed formats as well, AIFF or .dsf/dsd
There are a ton of DACs that support DSD, but not as much music is available at DSD rates. However, it can be upsampled in real time and superbly using HQPlayer from https://signalyst.com/ I use this software and have for 3 generations now, it can utilize CUDA and an Nvidia GPU to assist wtih the upsampling as well. I agree DSD is the best sounding digital.
Tape at any rate is nowhere near lossless and DSD is a gimmick. Virtually all professional digital audio equipment is PCM based and will continue to be for the foreseeable future despite DSD formats like SACD being over 25 years old. Even uber expensive digital converters are PCM focused so nearly everything is being tracked in PCM, mixed in a PCM based DAW that probably involves looping one or more of the tracks though analog gear at least once if not several times and finally it all gets mastered to PCM which typically involves yet another conversion from PCM to analog and back.
DSD is just a grift based on audiophile myth. There are many vastly more important considerations than which digital format is used when it comes to audio reproduction quality.
I wouldn’t recommend anyone pay any attention to DSD and definitely do not archive to tape.
The concerns of consumers seeking quality digital audio are compression quality with the ideal being lossless, avoiding “enhancements” that adulterate the signal and avoiding sample rate conversion.
Thanks, that was basically what I was looking for. It’s odd that none of the sites that sell 24 bit 192kHz albums lists the download size for the purchases. Tried looking on Qobuz and HDtracks and came up with nothing in their support pages. Odd that they don’t just list it somewhere for at least one download format.
Edit: It does but only after you buy and while downloading the specific track 
. Otherwise you have to look at the download in the folder after its done to get more info than the total size of your music download folder
Only one thing I could find online quoted 24/192 at ~66MB per minute (Digital File Sizes and Storage Requirements | Galen Carol Audio | Galen Carol Audio), and urs is close enough that it helps me estimate the storage I’ll need. Gonna need more storage 
I have a 45Homelab HL15 running TrueNAS full of 12TB drives in a RAIDZ3 and a good chunk of my storage is music. It depends on how much music you want to own versus stream. However, I caution you to understand that music WILL disappear from streaming services with no warning. It has happened to me already. It is why I buy and download immediately, my music, and then store it safely both here and in the cloud as a backup.
I disagree with most of what you say here. I have albums that were recorded in DSD, and were downloaded in DSD. I have albums that were recorded from the master tapes in DSD and they sound amazing. I am absolutely positive there are some bad DSD albums out there, but a well done DSD album is amazing. I even have one album that was recorded in DSD, from a first pressing of a vinyl album and I defy anyone to listen blind and tell me they are not listening to ridiculously high quality vinyl playback.
Like anything audio related, the entire chain matters. So if you’re getting bad DSD playback across the board, I would start looking at your playback chain.
Dont archive to tape, leave things in the format you have them in, just store them safely, like on a ZFS NAS and in the cloud so you don’t lose your investment in music.
A few more places I have bought music from:
High Definition Tape Transfers, seems relevant here. Outstanding customer service: https://www.highdeftapetransfers.ca/
I hvae purchased from Hi-Res Audio before, but I notice they are deep into MQA and that’s a scam, if you can find a definite non-MQA version there, go for it: HIGHRESAUDIO | home of high-resolution audio
Native DSD, exactly what it says: https://www.nativedsd.com/
Presto Music seems to offer downloads: https://www.prestomusic.com/classical
and of course, Qobuz. I also still buy and rip CDs from Artists when I am at a show, or CD Baby, Acoustic Sounds who used to have a fantastic download store, since closed.
Edit: I forgot HDTracks: https://www.hdtracks.com/
Did you ever hear DsD or tape on a decent amplifier and speakers? Yeah everything is pcm. and 24 bit pcm’s are wonderfull 32bit or 64 bit even better. But yeah i think bit densety is a wonderfull thing. But when will it matter. Only after really good amp, great speakers. and a room that is treated for audio. with speakers and chairs on the sweet spots. On blue tooth speakers. or stuff its not really going to matter.
tape i’m not talking about casete tape’s. i’m talking about tape tape real to real.
for most people forget everything i said. and just get a nice yamaha set with some good speakers and connect that to your computer and get some nice sound bliss
Of course… but you have to consider how much the fact that it was recorded using the DSD format contributed. I think well done PCM albums can be equally amazing because the digital format just doesn’t matter nearly as much as virtually any other factor. I imagine the humidity level in the studio on a given day has a greater impact than DSD vs PCM.
Raising the example of a recording from vinyl really serves to make my point. The adulteration of a recording during recording to vinyl is so much worse than even a poor conversion from DSD to PCM.
100% so many recordings are degraded by unnecessary format conversion. Often with a false belief that the conversion is improving quality.
Sure, I just don’t attribute the quality of the recording primarily to the use of the DSD format.
24 bit integer and 32 bit float audio have virtually the same precision because 32 bit float uses a 24 bit significand and a value of 1 is considered 0dBfs. In theory 32 bit has more dynamic range but in practice that range isn’t used so they’re effectively equal. Even 24 bit also delivers 144dB of dynamic range which is just beyond the limit of human perception. If you think you can hear the difference between 24, 32 and 64 bit audio then you’re fooling yourself.
ohw the difrence in headroom when i record in 32bit instead of 24 or 16 bit is amazing. make’s mixing so mutch sweeter. not to talk about ssl preamps with a bit of high pass filter. and then on 96khz sweetness.
you cant upscale turds, but recording somthing to tape and then back is fun. and then you can go up in bit and sample rate. I do feel mixing down to mp3 looses a lot. but wav or flac can handle mixdowns often better.
It’s nice to not worry about clipping when mixing but moving from integer to float doesn’t affect the sound otherwise. I think all DAW software has moved to float now with some even using 64 bit because with modern CPUs there’s no difference in performance so why not.
MP3 is lossy while WAV and FLAC are lossless so that’s expected. You may see better results with MP3 if you first export to WAV then compress externally using lame. Oddly a lot of audio software does a lousy job encoding MP3s. I know Protools and anything from Adobe used to be awful years back. I’m not sure if they’ve remedied the situation but wouldn’t be surprised if they haven’t.
The point was, and maybe I didn’t make it well, is that when recorded via PCM, the listener can tell it is a digital recording. When recorded using DSD, the listener can not tell they are not listening to the vinyl.
I have vinyl albums I want to record, but at the moment the equipment I have to record with only records in PCM up to 24/192 and that’s just not good enough. When the update to record in DSD finally becomes available, I will be recording and preserving some very precious vinyl albums for eternity.
Cubase is really good in it. Aldo i export my mix to wav. and then covert to mp3 from that wav file.
compresion i have to switch between file size and music compresion.
i love my drawmer 1970 it got a freaky fast fet compresor
I’ve never found anything in support of this or similar claims aside from marketing material. A few people from the DSD camp were attacking ABX testing as invalid which I also took as a dead giveaway that the format doesn’t offer any discernable advantage.
I think looking to the DSD format or higher sample rates for improved quality is a mistake. To make the most of your current interface try tracking at the same rate used during playback which is most likely 48kHz. ADCs rarely perform best at their highest supported sample rate. Try recording at 24 bit 48kHz and at levels nowhere near clipping with peaks staying below at least -6dBfs to avoid any non linearity near the top end of the range. If you really want to go all out on transparency then use bit shift gain to bring the signal back up by 6dB.
Using an ADC that has a dedicated line level input will also provide a slight benefit because it will make the phono preamp the only preamp in the chain by eliminating the second preamp internal to the ADC that’s only needed for instrument and mic inputs. I’d focus on the quality of your turntable, pickups, phono preamp and ADC. Getting distracted by DSD vs PCM or PCM sample rates isn’t likely to deliver the results you’re looking for.
I thought this was a good and also fairly recent round up of audio interfaces if you’re looking to replace your current interface. Note the loopback test near the beginning of the video, modern interfaces tend to be quite transparent so most gains in quality will be found on the analog side of your setup.
well, you have fun with that.
I agree… Nyquist theorem + human physiology guarantees that anything above 44.1KHz doesn’t do anything. Not to mention how most audio equipment filters out signals over about 20KHz to avoid potential artifacts from the downstream equipment not handling them well. AFAIK that even includes most high res DACs.
DSD is interesting in principle but I’m not sure if it has too much use outside from digitising analog material. PCM is very dominant and tools and software for mixing are AFAIK much more limited. Input from pretty much all digital recording equipment will be in a PCM format too, so converting that to DSD won’t get you much if anything?
For mixing there is indisputably a big advantage to higher resolution. For the final output not so much. You can mathematically prove that the only advantage of higher bit depth is better dynamic range. 16 bit already offers 98 dB, pretty much enough to reach the threshold of pain in an anechoic chamber. And that’s even before doing noise shaping. Source: Audio bit depth - Wikipedia
Personally, in some cases I can hear the difference between well encoded lossy formats (say AAC 256 kbps) and lossless (well recorded jazz or classical on good headphones or speakers). But I’ve never heard any advantage from ‘high res’ audio, and any science/math on digital audio shows that there won’t be any advantage, unless you are one of the rare humans that can hear up to 30kHz; and even then most recording studios and equipment will have low pass filters well below that, even for ‘high res’ output…
Highly recommended video on how digital audio works:
