I have a reasonably large collection of RIPed CDs running on my NAS and served by Roon. As these albums have been re-released in HiRes, I often have gone out and purchased (mostly from HDTracks) the HiRes version. I’ve noted that it is frequently the case that the DR reported by Roon shows a higher DR figure on the original CD RiP (44/16) than the new HDTracks download (96/24 or 192/24). This is the opposite of what I would expect, I would think that the HiRes would have a higher DR figure. If it were very occasional, I would probably not have noticed it, however, it seems relatively common.
There are of course many variables – the master used, etc. I intended to hit the files with some other tools to further investigate the DR figures. I was wondering if others had similar observations.
Little, if anything is lacking in the original CD masterings. And many of the “high resolution” remasterings are modern loudness war casualties. That is the most common explanation.
HiRes doesn’t mean automatically better quality, sometimes it’s more like grabbing the customers money twice.
Of course there are many good sounding recordings which were transfered to HiRes, but don’t underestimate the quality of a well mastered CD.
If you have enough time have a look at the Steve Hoffman forum to get some ideas, which album version seems to be a good or best one. It has been an incredible valuable source of information for me and i bought many CDs (also some rare ones) due to the details I found there.
Thank you gentlemen, good points all. I certainly agree that HiRes <> Best/Better version. I hoped (or perhaps naively presumed) that recently released HiRes versions of albums would have been less a victim of the loudness wars and had less compression than their CD versions released in the seeming peak of the loudness trend (90’s?).