So true! Which makes Tidal, or whatever your streaming preference is, essential for previewing potential high res / (higher) res purchases.
If high res for high res’s sake is your thing, then you’re not a discerning music aficionado.
I know Pet Sounds very, very well. I have studied it for years. I have collected some really good versions, starting with vinyl, 40 years back.
It’s one of those rare records which sounds best on gear that’s optimised for mono.
Brian lived in a monophonic world, having been totally deaf in one ear. He mixed the record the way he heard it in his head.
I remember reading an article in Rolling Stone when I was a kid. It was an interview within a bigger piece about Wilson. The guy asked him if he had ever considered re-mixing Pet Sounds in stereo. Brian just said, “Why?”
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My collection is all over the place and still pock marked with 128kbps MP3.
What software have you had the most success with for finding duplicates and then deleting the lower quality versions?
You can do this with Albums/Focus/Format/MP3. this will find everything.
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I mostly (99.9 %) have lossless or better (FLAC, DSD, WAV) in my Roon library. The only exceptions are some of the versions that you just don’t get anymore. Two specific examples:
- An “extended” edition of Whipping Post from the Allman Brothers Fillmore concert, that doesn’t appear on any of the streaming services that I happen to have on 256 mp3.
- Ditto for “Whole Lotta Love” from Led Zeppelin’s “How the West Was Won” that includes the Boogie.
Others I simply use Tidal FLAC or MQA where available.
It’s like suggesting to remix Kind of Blue! Ugh. I know many people like the Love remix by Giles Martin of the Beatles and understand how the remix works for a circus act, but I find it unlistenable.
Pet Sounds is a masterpiece of course but I know I’m in a minority when I say The Surfs Up album is even better! 
H
I don’t want to go off-topic, but I just can’t help myself reading some of the comments here: People focus too much on having everything hi-res, but it’s really all about mastering quality. CD quality (44.1/16) is absolutely fine. I have done countless tests on quality systems comparing CD vs hi-res versions of the same master - the differences are hardly audible, if there any at all.
That said, good master/release sounds great even in mp3 320/256 kbps (I would not go lower probably). Of course, having it in lossless is always better, but hi-res is not necessary at all.
Good thing about Roon is that it nicely puts all versions together. And in case of Tidal, there are many examples where MQA version is worse than a standard CD quality older (sometimes even original) release - especially those before ~1995 not impacted by loudness wars yet.
The selection of masters/releases is still a major limitation of streaming services and this is why collections of physical media still matter.
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I too have a small collection of MP3s that I added (reluctantly) last week because I missed listening to them. They’re good quality, and used as background music in the living room, you can’t really tell the difference in quality anyhow. To me Roon is as much about convenience as audio quality, and I would be happy to see a Spotify integration and use it for the sake of discovering new music, regardless of its less than bit perfect quality.
Yeah, I love Surfs Up. But how many people, if pressed to name a Beach Boys record, would come up with that one? (I know, now I’m the one who’s off-topic).
No point here, other than the fact that Pet Sounds was Brian’s most celebrated work… but not necessarily my favorite either.
When we have a party we just select a list and don’t care what resolution the files are at, after all nobody is REALLY LISTENING. Most of my rooms have a compact B&W speaker or other networked speakers that go party-loud without distortion.
However in my listening room which is acoustically treated and playing my best system, that’s a different matter.
I do agree that if you’re listening to a digital copy of eg a 1931 Skip James track, or a 1951 Mahler by Bruno Walter, its the digital capture and mastering that’s far more important than the eventual compression. Nevertheless since Ben these files are available at CD quality on Tidal etc why bother with the MP3?
H
I should ditch most of my very lo-res files. I acquired them to sample albums to see if I wanted to purchase them… and this was before streaming services. I have never chosen to listen to one of those files over the offering on Qobuz (since I got the service) and Qobuz has really taken the place of the role that downloaded lo-res files had in my library.
And if I still go by my rule of “if you would miss it if the streaming services were to take it away, buy it!”, I can’t go wrong and don’t need the baggage. Not since I am ripping my SACDs and need all the room I can get! 