USA Today: Music lovers pursue technologies to return to high fidelity Options

[jamesbaud]

http://m.usatoday.com/article/tech/52963362

I thought this was interesting.

[derty2]

Speaking as a music lover and consumer of high-fidelity digital audio, even if hi-rez digital downloads became a common item for purchase, that fact in itself is not a good enough reason for me to purchase. The presentation of the product is just as important to me as the actual consumption.

For example, there is an official vendor on the internet named "HDTracks" who supply such content right now. But every time I look at the presentations for an release, I feel insulted; my intelligence is being insulted; I don't want to be a hi-rez consuming rabbit. I want to be presented with ALL facts about the product from every possible angle; presentational, technical, engineering, artistic, fanatical, historical, factual ...everything!

Publish some screenshots of the audio waveform and spectrum ...I am fascinated in the technical details; let me have a look!

Publish the facts about the engineering facility and the engineers names and all the other behind-the-scenes stuff!

View the product page as a thread in a forum; allow the users to leave comments and interact (such as done at Amazon.com).

Basically, what I am trying to say is this...
Until the day comes where I see an album presented to me by an official site that looks like a cross between Discogs.com and 'unofficial' vinyl ripping blogs, then that's the day I will be a regular official consumer.

[db1989]

HDTracks

Who, in addition to anything else that might be said, have a rather questionable approach to marketing their products (emphasis mine):

Q: Will I really hear the difference between the various formats?
A: You should hear a substantial difference when listening to the music on a home stereo. The music will sound cleaner, the bass will be tighter and you will notice a higher definition in all the instruments. If you are going to pay for digital music, you might as well own it in the highest-quality format available.

Q: Why do you charge more for tracks?
A: Many web-based music downloading sites sell tracks for $0.99. However, they are selling you low-quality MP3-compressed files. Full CD-quality files use more bandwidth and storage space so our costs are higher. In addition, we use specialized audiophile encoding processes to get the best sound. With HDtracks you might pay more per download, but you are getting a much higher-quality product.

Perhaps this brings them quite neatly in line with the article being discussed.