It effortlessly shows off that behind the hooks, this is a quartet of seriously talented musicians. Fundamentally, this is still a big, ballistic rock effort but compared to the 2001 CD, it’s more spacious, and simply sounds like it was created for a HiFi system rather than a transistor radio.
Taking an album like Bleed American and releasing a 24/192 version might seem a bit like getting Heston Blumenthal to make you a Big Mac but the results are quite surprising. This isn’t an album to consider the meaning of life to but it’s punchy, anthemic and entertaining. In the UK, it actually managed to get air time – helped in no small part by The Middle being both catchy and having a video that was easy enough on the eye. Dropped by Capitol Records, it was recorded with the band’s own money and eventually released on the Dreamworks label. Jimmy Eat World has hovered around the peripheries of being a properly big band for over twenty years (they are still releasing material and their last album Integrity Blues is a fine effort) but Bleed American is both their highest moment and came from their lowest ebb. These ten albums will work pretty much regardless of the hardware and equipment you have so they can be recommended without concerns over whether they will work or not. This list is far from exhaustive and it has no DSD titles on it. There’s a bewildering selection of choice available in terms of genres and sample rates and some of it you don’t even need to pay for. On a more basic level, the effort of creating these files means that more effort goes into their mastering which in turn generally improves performance too.Īs such, there’s no better time to dip a toe in the waters of Hi-Res. We’re coming out of the compressed music era – the limits that existed on bandwidth and storage no longer exist so the ‘big deal’ is we’re back up to CD sized files for streaming.īut if there is no technical need to have more bandwidth and information than CD, why bother? The answers to this are an article in themselves but the long and the short of it is that the extra information – if handled and decoded correctly – can be used to create a signal that we perceive to be more natural and less processed. The second is that music has first had to go backwards to go forwards. A well mastered CD can sound staggeringly good and the notional thresholds of human hearing are something that are well within reach of a 16/44.1 file.
The first is that as benchmarks go, it’s a pretty solid one.
This varies slightly from product to product but one characteristic is present on pretty much anything we test and that is that it can handle resolutions and sampling rates that are far in advance of that on a CD – a thirty plus year old benchmark that we seem curiously reluctant to part with.