There is no point in higher fidelity specs of the Touch if you dont have confidence in the audio specs of the music you want it to play. Consumers are entitled to full disclosure as to exactly what any retailer is selling.
The implication from the HDTracks store, when it offers for sale a given album at 88.2, is that it is originally recorded natively at PCM 88.2. There is no asterisk, no footnote, no explanation, on the album page itself to explain any differently how the album was recorded. Any material that has originally been recorded at any other spec or any other format requires by definition some type of conversion to get to PCM 88.2. Then it becomes a matter of debate for the audiophiles as to whether the converted material is as good as natively recorded material. But the debate cant even start until it is known what the specs of the material are in its original form and how it was converted. That is called full disclosure. A general note at the beginning page of the HDTracks high resolution store which apparently applies to all the albums sold at 88.2, states that that is not necessarily the case that there was a native PCM recording of equal or higher quality. Three different scenarios are specified as to how any given album may be offered at 88.2. The consumer is then, if he noticed this spec, which is on a different page than the actual album he is considering purchasing, left to guess as to which process was used to obtain the 88.2. We know from independent sources, namely the record labels of the San Francisco and Chicago orchestras, that only an SACD is supplied to HDTracks from at least these two orchestras. And because the intermediate source is an SACD, this is not like ripping a CD. When a CD is ripped, you get a perfect copy. That is not the case with an SACD because it was recorded in the DSD format and then converted to the PCM format, a totally different digital format. A perfect bit for bit copy is not possible. DSD is 1 bit. The PCM downloadable file is 24 bits. So the conversion process to get from DSD to PCM ups the bit depth from 1 to 24. This process is not copying, but instead a conversion, which, according to Meitner, the owner of the company that manufactures the machine that may have been used in the conversion, results in some loss of fidelity. Shouldnt the explanation be: Originally recorded in DSD format, converted to SACD disk, then converted to PCM format. Note: the downloadable file is not a perfect copy of the original recording. And if any of the machines used in the conversion process had been modified, this may be a possible violation of Sonys intellectual property rights and may be a possible violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Section 1201. Now that would be full disclosure. -- mortslim ------------------------------------------------------------------------ mortslim's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=11039 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=74688
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