There’s no way to get reliable info on most older recordings. Since it was not on the labels/producers/musicians radar at the time.
As things are nobody knows what anything is, I have a few albums on CD different covers, different issuers, different etc. When i do a checksum comparison (Couldn’t hear any diff) they are exactly the same files:face_with_raised_eyebrow:
That tells me that either the labels don’t know or they just don’t care
Danny, I set up the events that occurred at the MQA seminar the night before at RMAF 2018. It was remarkably easy to get everyone to react the way I wanted them to. I had a notebook with all the information I would need to gun everyone in the room down and the public speaking experience to do it. I got the video I wanted without saying word.
Back to providence.
I think Neil Young’s Pono player had a blue light to display Provenance. Soon people found how to add the metadata tags to turn it on. At least he had the right idea and I feel the right motive.
Back on topic providence, I’m willing to listen to arguments that a significant number of people care. The Doors Riders on the Storm never had a master, they ran out of tracks. The original masters of the Grateful Dead’s American Beauty and Workingman’s Dead were discarded after Mickey Hart’s remasters. I’m not seeing outrage over these events.
Now look at Discogs, The Flying Burrito Brothers, Gilded Palace of Sin there are 51 versions. The only providence I care about is Intervention Records 180g vinyl from 2017 made from the safety copy of the master tape because the original master burned up in 2008. As for the rest all they must do is sound good.
A favorite of mine, Dr Dog’s B Room MQA version was never signed off by the band or the mastering engineer.
My argument is if the major labels cared about providence and master recordings, they would have taken better care of them. And they would have spent a few extra dollars to document what they were storing. That haven’t been is an indication they don’t believe enough people care for it to be an issue.
There is the saying that you cannot make people understand if the get incentives for not understanding.
192/24 is how most of the hi-res music was recorded. Give me that. If that is not sufficient for artists to support as an authentic recording someone is lying to you my friend. And all this BS about provenance has very simple goal: to own the entire path from the recording to reproduction and and charge you for every step. And again if you believe the quality exceeds good reprodution of the 192/24 file using PCM you are welcome to believe in whatever you want.
Recorded? You mean in the studio, or, do you mean digitized from tape. Absolutely not in terms of recording. And, I think most things are digitized to 24/48, and probably 24/96, than 24/192.
Actual hi-res or analog tape and early digital dumped in a new container?
Yes you are right I meant digitized from tape. And even if it was digitized to 24/96, 24/48, I want that.
Hi Progisus,
FYI, the blue light on the PonoPlayer was a relict of the early cooperation with Meridian. Finally, the only provenance it shows is that the track was originally downloaded from the PonoMusic store, that’s all!
Funny thing beside this is that Bruce Botnick was responsible for “provenance” at PonoMusic and failed because PonoMusic sold the music files, delivered from the labels, like most other download stores without any quality check. I still can remember some not really positive posts from him about MQA in the PonoMusic Community where we discussed already in 2015 the issues of the “better than the original” claims, DRM option and the stated strive for a monopoly of this “innovation” with a special history concerning the PonoPlayer. Now I must confess that Bruce obviously has converted and act as a MQA promoter, for what reasons ever.
I do not remember Elon Musk starting Tesla by plain lying about the product. Remember lossless MQA?
That was MQA in its early form. Neil ditched it when they couldn’t get it together in time and went with plain flac.
So, it’s “sane and desirable” to remove audio data (remember, MQA is a LOSSY audio format) so that you can get a blue light saying that you have “provenance”, from companies that when asked for high-res music by one company, up-sampled low res versions to provide it, and also have been providing, in some cases, clearly up-sampled music to TIDAL for MQA?
Seriously?
If you want to have labels provide provenance, there is this thing in the computer world called a “checksum” for files that does that. It could readily be programmed into your software. Then, it would be trivial for a label, if so desired, to provide checksums for their files online through an API.
Thankfully! Therefore we’ve got one of the best sounding DAPs so far. Many thanks to Charley Hansen, RIP and the involved Ayre and Pono teams. Sorry for getting a little bit OT.
Yep I think too many people just reacted to the hype and never listened to the hardware. The Dac setup for the Pono would be used as the basis for the Codex. Yhe Pono was wonderful sounding. I have the special edition signed Herbie Hancock.
Not to be cynical or anything, but… “The SINAD figure naturally lands the CODEX near the bottom of the pile of DACs out of some 125 tested so far”.
Well, there’s a reason to why I didn’t quote the part where he gives his subjective assessment of it, and that’s because an AP doesn’t like, or dislike, what it measures. Which in this particular case, is 30db worse, and 50x more expensive, than an Apple dongle.
There is a lot of space between the two devices and Ayre made many other choices. He has never measured the Pono as far as I know. I actually would expect the Pono to score better.
Mine is not a special edition… better yet I have it signed by a few of my Prog heroes. Anathema (Lee Douglas,Vince Cavanagh), YES (Geoff Downes, Billy Sherwood). It’s stored in the wonderful wooden box it came with. I actually had three of them. I gave a couple to friends to start their Hi Rez journey. No matter how it measures it sounded great for it’s time.