Just a heads up,..

There's a 15% discount code (on that other site) for the Rolling Stones hi rez downloads that HD Tracks are selling.

I guess I could just paste it here but somehow that doesn't seem right?

Whatever,.. all you have to do is visit that site and copy and paste it to the "discount code" box when you're checking out.

If you're like me, I'm just grabbing the "Through the Past..." and waiting for "Let it Bleed" and hopefully "Sticky Fingers" latter on.

I haven't got anything but the original vinyl of this stuff so don't ask me to do comparisons! If I can't hear a difference without A/Bing it,.. it isn't significant in my book.

Yeah, I'm waiting for Banquet and Bleed. Don't see the others of interest (Fingers, Exile) listed as coming. Not sure the labels involved.

Wonder if Singles Collection could sound decent as the redbook is possibly the worst sounding collection I've heard.

To be honest I don't hear any difference with the 24/88 files and the redbook layer on the SACDs. These albums weren't really well recorded. From what I understand the high res PCM files are taken from the DSD that was used for the hybrid SACDs. Though those SACDs now command a premium, I don't think I paid more than $15 for any of them when they were in print so the HDTracks pricing is a bit expensive.

It would make me happy if Exile came out in hi rez.

Yeah, a definitive "bands-view" heroin-edition simulated surround box-set would be mind blowing.

I got the impression it was the Abkco releases, so should be the same as the SACD's, no?

One or two of the announcement articles said it was from the SACDs.

Deepak - are you saying none of the albums are really worth buying as they're all not recorded very well? I was thinking about buying 2 of them but if the recording quality is sub-par....

Edited March 15, 201115 yr by Asr

Yeah, these are from the DSD masters (probably 1 bit 5.6MHz) generated from the tape masters.

I don't think that any of the Stones recordings could be considered "reference quality".

I believe that a lot of the sound quality issues are on the "session tapes". Once these guys got big, they didn't spend a whole lot of time together in the studio. In fact, Richards had the mobile studio at his villa in the south of France and some of his tracks were recorded there. That isn't to say that there was anything wrong with the gear/engineering that was done in that truck, but it's kinda tough to get another take in those kinds of situations. Anytime you end up with tracks recorded at different times/places, there's extra processing that has to be done to get some continuity to "glue" the tracks together.

Well, anyway, for some material like this, I'm pretty happy with it sounding "not bad". I love the songs enough that the only "deep listening" I do with them is to figure out what the engineer is shooting for.