Well, it’s kind of hard now to change my musical tastes. Just curious though, is jazz only available in hi-res? Isn’t there a cheaper CD option? What store are you getting your music from?
Like @AndersVinberg I’m a modern jazz fan. My main sources are Qobuz and Bandcamp. In the last 6 months I added 124 jazz albums to my Roon library: 79: 44.1/(16 or 24), 3: 48/24, 4: 88.2/24, 38: 96/24. 34 are Qobuz streamed, rest download purchases. 97 were released since 2010. 20 more 2000-2009, the remaining 7 before 2000.
Yeah, tech should not drive the musical taste.
Certainly all jazz is not hi res.
First, Jazz is a very broad field with lots of sub genres. And lots of countries. And widely varying mass appeal.
What I have noted is that much of the kind of jazz I like comes in 96k. But much does not. Shrug, it’s all good.
When buying downloads, as I recall there were often different resolutions at different prices but it’s been such a long time, almost all streamed these days with obviously no price difference.
Just for reference, of my roughly 5,000 album library, 1/3 is local, 2/3 is streamed (Tidal & Qobuz). In both groups, 19 % are hi res. But I have had Tidal longer and Tidal doesn’t have hi res; of the 1,000 Qobuz albums, half are hi res.
Should the same apply to those that spend so much time trying to convince others that there are no audible differences? Reconsider priorities? 
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One of the best things about the Sublime+ tier in Qobuz is that you can often buy hires at about 50% off - cheaper than a Redbook version. So definitely not a scam.
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The original question was: Buying Hi Res files … is it a scam?
I cannot answer this question, but most HiRes files were simply upscaled and not HiRes recording.
It irritates me, that you find such an article
http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=17972
published by the AES. Obviously it is very common, to just upscale old recordings and sell them as HiRes.
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Thanks for answering the original question 
This may be of interest to some of you. I think you can still sign up to participate:
https://www.realhd-audio.com/?p=6938
@Peter_Bruderer is absolutely right, if the original recording is not HiRes (defined how you choose) then no subsequent file can ever be HiRes, just plonked inside a HiRes container (although maybe someone can comment on how that works with true analogue masters - can you create any res of digital file you like at ADC stage? Presumably you can?)
This is actually extremely common. Archimago at http://archimago.blogspot.com/ has discussed exactly this at length over many years, as have others. The view seems to be that, if not exactly a scam, it is probably just another way of selling us our music. Again
Do the issues discussed here in relation to filtering etc etc mean that a given redbook track presented either as a 16/44 FLAC or inside a 24/96 container sound the same? As always the answer is - it depends; on you, your mood, your ears, your room, your system
My own system is highly resolving (Chord Blu2/DAVE, DSP room correction, hybrid electrostatic speakers) and I can convince myself that there is a difference between say my 24/96 version of Hotel California and the 16/44 version. But I must be honest and say that I’m listening here for very small timbre differences in particular instruments in a mix I know intimately and I could probably do it blind on this one track, but not all
I do think that all the HiRes providers are being somewhat disingenuous with some of their claims and, like all things in our beloved hobby, subjective (ie: scientifically valueless) opinion is king
Just my tuppence ha’penny worth
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I have a large amount of Jazz and Rock vintage music - 50’s 60’s and 70’s, that I bought as hi-res remasters in PCM and DSD/SACD.
Obviously they are all from a tape source.
Many of them sound great, and in my opinion sound better than previous LP or CD versions. And many of these aren’t available in any other format.
So I don’t give a whit if they are considered “true” hi-res. No one who buys these albums thinks they were recorded in hi-res.
How is that a scam?
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Why do you believe most files are fraudulent?
Just claiming it doesn’t convince.
And the AES paper just talks about some software to detect it.
So presumably the original analogue masters have been digitised in ‘hi res’ format
There is no ‘scam’ here, you are buying a ‘hi res digitisation of an analogue original’ and if it sounds good, it sounds good. If it sounds ‘better’ than a 16/44 digitisation of the same master, even better
Similarly DDD recordings originally made at 24/96 or whatever are equally ‘hi res digitisations of an analogue original’, in this case the original is the musicians/instruments, not the master tape, but the concept is the same (although I think these are quite uncommon due to the logistics of mastering very large file sizes. When I talked about this with a producer friend of mine he quipped “Who wants a 20GB drum track!”)
The ‘scam’ problem comes when a standard 16/44 digital recording is simply plonked inside a 24/96 audio format container (“upscaled”) and marketed as ‘hi res’ and I think this is what @alessandro_niola was originally noting with the spectral analysis
I believe Neil Young caused some controversy with his Pono player by doing something just like that with 16/44 originals
Allegedly 
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No, Neil Yound didn’t do that. He had a Pono site selling both hires and Redbook, all clearly marked.
24/96 is very common in classical recordings. Lots of albums are recorded that way. In popular music, 24/44.1 is pretty common and there is also 24/48 - much less 88 or 96k. 24 bit is used b/c in multitrack recording/mixing it allows conservation of dynamic range.
The upsampling to hi-res (without acknowledgement) is pretty rare these days.
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My bad dissing Neil 
Apologies
But the point stands - allegations of ‘scamming’ revolve around lack of clarity/understanding about the entire recording process rather than any inherent flaws in the concept
quick question just to clarify my understanding of the OP and the included spectrograms…
looking at the spek website and the author’s link to the wikipedia spectrogram article, the description of these spectrograms indicates the y-axis frequency being measured is the audio frequency range rather than the sampling frequency
the spectrographs show an audio frequency range that corresponds to range of human hearing (aprox 20Hz - 20kHz) with the color at each point in time representing the amplitude of individual frequencies within the audio frequency range.
the sampling frequency which seems to be the intended topic of discussion is something quite different. it is simply the frequency or number of times each second that a sample is taken from the continuous source signal in order to approximate it with a discrete digital signal – obviously, the higher the sampling rate the better the discrete signal represents the continuous source signal.
i agree that upsampled and upscaled 16/44.1 digital files to create pseudo hi-res audio files is something to be wary about and is not equivalent to a true true hi-res file where the file was created by sampling the audio source at the higher frequency and bit-depth.
anyway, just wanted to see if i have understood things correctly or if i have gone off the rails here in trying to understand the OP – which is indeed a topic of keene interest.
According to Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem this is not exactly correct in this context, although I am not answering your question directly so I apologise for drifting off topic. PM me if you want to discuss further
thanks – let me amend my casual statement on sampling…
notwithstanding the nyquist-shannon sampling theorem, the higher the sampling rate the better the discrete signal represents the continuous source signal.
The higher the sampling rate, the higher frequencies you can record. For lower frequencies using a faster sampling rate does not improve the sound quality.
I’ll let Monty explain and demonstrate it 
But that is not the case (as I understand it, at least): for a given band-limited signal, provided you’re sampling at at least the Nyquist frequency, increasing the sample frequency doesn’t give you a better representation of the continuous signal.
Yes, that’s what the theorem says. But it is math. It doesn’t say that this mathematical solution is physically realizable.
(If you believe otherwise, if you believe that a 44.1 sampling rate permits perfect recreation of the original audio, I have a pristine 1982 Sony CD player I can sell you, only $35,000, a bargain for perfect reproduction, right? Oh, those old devices were not good, but with today’s technology reproduction is perfect because Nyquist says so? Where does the theorem mention 2020?)
The problem is that the theorem involves infinitely long functions and infinite is problematic because of budget and energy consumption and processing latency, and we would all be consumed by a black hole. Math doesn’t have a problem with infinity, engineering does. And most mathematical theorems do not discuss how closely we can approximate the theoretical answer, at what cost.
Math is great. But this is an engineering problem, there are practical challenges that make 16/44 imperfect.
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