Downloaded my first 96/24 recording - Charlie Haden / Antonio Forcione Heartplay

I've had a DAC that can play 96/24 recordings for a few months now, but I've never actually tried it with anything more high res that 48/24. Today I bought a 96/24 version of the Charlie Haden/Antonio Forcione Heartplay album.

I got it from Naim records for 25 euros. The site didn't ask if I was a USA resident, I just registered with my email address and a password to login, and then went through a standard secure payment process. It used an Adobe Air based download app, much the same as B&W's Society of Sound site. I took a long time but all went very smoothly.

In contrast, HDTracks expects you to either be a USA resident or some kind of crook impersonating one. Also I've read about problems with their secure payment system on this site, where some people were defrauded out of several thousand dollars. On the Audio Circle forum I read that in the past, not all of the 'high resolution' tracks on HDTracks are actually high resolution, and people have found that they were just upsampled 44.1/16 material. All that kind of stuff obviously puts me off using HDTracks big time, which is a shame as they have an interesting selection of high res material that you can't get anywhere else.

I've just listened to Heartplay and it is great music and great sound. The CD 'Jasmine' by Charlie Haden and Keith Jarett that I bought recently for about 16 euros, as opposed to 25 euros, also sounds great and is great music too. Charlie Haden is pretty reliable in my experience - if I come across a CD of his that I haven't seen before I tend to just buy it. So for me I will splash out 25 euros on a Charlie Haden download because I know it is pretty certain to be really good. On the other hand, if I see a high resolution download of someone I've never heard of it is very unlikely I will spend 25 euros.

CDs come in a boxes, have some sleeve notes on paper, and you don't need me to back them up. So I'm wondering why we are expected to pay more simply because something is 96/24? There should be savings of not having to press the CD, send it to a shop, and pay the shop's profit margins. I wonder why those savings are not being passed on to us. Why do I end up paying 10 euros more for something which probably cost less to produce than the Jasmine CD?

It comes down to how many albums do people want to buy. If I have a fixed budget and albums cost 10 euros instead of 25 euros, that means I will buy at least 2.5 times more albums. As internet downloads cost pretty much nothing per copy to reproduce, unlike CDs or LPs, I would expect that to be the sort of calculation that record labels would be making. How can we get music fans to get into as much music as possible so they go to live gigs, buy tee shirts, subscribe to fan club membership and so on. If I was a millionare I still wouldn't buy CDs at random though, because you need things like radio programs or music clubs like Society of Sound to help you find what is good.

After all that, my only point is why are high res recordings so expensive when they don't cost more to produce? I recently came across a second hand record shop in Las Palmas near where I live where I can buy LPs of Canarian folk music for 4 euros each. So I could buy four Naim Charlie Hadens for 100 euros, or I could get 25 Canarian folk albums instead. Err, well I'll probably end up getting both, but I hope you see my point.