Clemens Wergin

I am trying to figure out how to stream 24/96 files to my iPhone and iPad. I already succeeded in making it work. But I am still interested in the fact if the files are downsampled for streaming from the computer to your iDevices? I am considering buying the Fostex HP-1P Amp/DAC which takes the digital stream from apple devices. The problem: It doesn't work well with the iPad, but very well with the iPhone, at least that is my experience with the Fostex I tried in a Hifi shop the other day. With the iPad there were little interruptions, sounded as if the guys in the recording studio had mixed some old vinyl feeling into it. Although both can be loaded as iPods only up to 24/48, when at home, the home sharing function would give me access to listen to 24/96 files wherever I happen to be. So any ideas if the iPhone really passes on a 24/96 stream digitally? And if the Fostex would be able to work with that?

I got a mail this night from HDTracks inviting me to download the new Norah Jones album "Little broken Hearts". When I clicked on the "buy now" button the system blocked me again, because people with German IP address weren't allowed to buy the High Res file. So Blue Notes has joined the club of record companies who want to prevent Germans and probably other Non-Americans from buying this album in the best digital format available. Because the alternative to HDTracks, the German website Highresaudio.com, doesn't deal with Blue Notes. That's just so plain stupid that at Blue Notes they wouldn't want to get my hard earned Euros. As usual on Blue Note's website there isn't even an E-mail address to inquire why that would be the case. In the meantime I wrote to Norah Jones' sales manager. Let's see if he is going to reply at all...

Dear Jan, you rightly presumed that Norman Chesky had intended his mail as a private one and not for publication. But I think it is fair to say that HDtracks is also not happy with the situation and is negotiating with the labels concerned to make them change their policy Best, Clemens

I am not technically minded enough to be able to really follow the debate above. The only thing I want to say is: I am probably among the first to have ordered the Metrum Octave in the Netherlands right after the rave review on 6moons. I am using it for 1 1/2 years now and still enjoying it. I didn't do any direct A/B comparisons, but I enjoy listening to Highres via the Metrum more than listening to records on my Rega P3-24. And when it comes to the lesser resolution of CD material the Metrum to my ears doesn't seem to display the annoying sound features that made me abandon my CD player in the first place. I never had any technical issues with the Metrum Octave and the only thing I miss is 192 capability and maybe in the future a USB input (at the moment I stream music via a Squeezebox Touch so both issues currently don't really matter to me)

I just wanted to inform the readers of this post that Norman Chesky of HDtracks took the pain at 4.30 in the morning his time to write an e-mail to respond to my Blog post. It was a very nice and long mail and I asked for permission to publish it on my Blog. If he agrees I will let you know. I am impressed that he took this very seriously. Thanks Norman

It's interesting to note that I haven't gotten any reply yet, neither from HDtracks nor from the record companies I mailed to...

@jonp that's exactly the way I see it. Hiding my IP address might not be illegal, but breaking the agreement between HDTracks and the record company might be illegal. And if I already pay for that stuff I also want to be sure to be on the safe side of things. As somebody who is working in the content industry I am all for doing this the right way...

@jan if this is the case that high resolution files might not be worthwhile for record companies they will definitely not get more money out of it by restricting the number of people who are able to buy it. So if they want this business to succeed they should broaden the consumer base instead of restricting it...

@jan I don't know how complicated this VAT problem really is. But it doesn't seem logical to me that big firms like Warner should not be able to overcome it while a lot of others not blocking their content on Hdtracks actually do. If you have read carefully what I wrote you also might have noticed that I didn't put the blame on HDtracks, but on individual record companies

@gordon I always use paypal, that doesn't seem to be the problem

@inferno I have seen the other posts only after I had posted mine. I understand that the industry would license the rigths regionally to other portals. The problem is only that they didn't. So as long as they don't sell it on Highresaudio there is just no way for me to get them legally. And what is even more strange: in the beginning I was able to download some of the WarnerBros albums. They only blocked them later. And when it comes to the taxing issue discussed in the other post: how come that smaller labels on HDtracks don't have a problem with that and a multinational like WarnerBros does? Just doesn't seem to make sense to me...

@digipete well of course I know them. The problem is: they don't sell most of the stuff that is blocked on HDtracks. And as far as my research goes it is nowhere else to be had

As somebody living outside the US, in Germany, I find it increasingly annoying that many HD files that are sold on HDtracks are blocked for somebody with a foreign IP address like mine. Friday morning I wanted to download the new album by Esperanza Spalding in high resolution from HDtracks after they had publicized it in a promotional mail I got from them. And then a message popped up that read “Based on your territory as determined by your IP address, we are unable to sell you this album due to restrictions imposed on us by the record label. We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for shopping at HDtracks!” It should of course have read: “thank you for not shopping at HDtracks”, because it actually prevented me from buying anything. What that means? Well it means that people in Germany (and probably elsewhere, too) just can’t get the new Spalding album “Radio Music Society” in HD. Because it is not listed with HDtrack’s German competitor Highresaudio or any other of the few websites selling music files in master tape quality. It is a discriminatory practice and how far it reaches is difficult to gauge. Because a German (and other excluded foreigners) won’t notice at first sight that there are a lot of labels he or she is not allowed to download. Because when you browse the catalogue of HDtracks they already exclude the blocked labels for a foreign visitor. It is only by clicking on promotional links at their home page or in their weekly mails that you realize that many things are just not made for you. The prohibited catalogue includes the formidable collection of old Jazz tape recordings by Warner Brothers/Rhino/Atlantic transfered to 24/192 resolution. It includes also stunning Mercury recordings and some other labels. And then there are those like the guys from “Decca” who think Germans are plain stupid. They sell their albums usually at 17.98 Dollars at HDtracks, which equals 13,63 Euro. If you are from Germany you cannot buy Decca albums at HDtracks like Americans can, because they want you to buy at Highresaudio where the same album will cost 21 Euro, more than 50 % more . And they probably think that most audiophile Germans will not find out that the store around the (digital) corner sells the same stuff for much less. The Decca trick is gross given the fact that per capita income in Germany is lower than in the US. But it is better than not being able to buy Highres files at all. I am wondering why some record companies think that people outside the US are not interested in a music format that definetly sounds better than CD. I wrote mails to HDtracks and some of the record companies involved. I didn’t get any reply yet. I wonder what justification they’ll come up with. For anybody interested I have written about it more extensively in my Blog (which is usually about foreign policy, Hifi is only a Hobby for me): http://flatworld.welt.de/2012/03/23/record-companies-think-germans-are-stupid/ I wonder if people around the world have made similar experiences and if somebody ever tried to ask record companies for justification

@barrows What I just don't get is the following: the whole idea of a NOS is not to oversample or upsample. The idea being that this will cause problems in the time domain. So what is the difference if you upsample 44/16 to 756 and then send it through the Nos from what usual CD players are doing, albeit to lower upsampling rates? Well you could say, you don't do it on the fly like a CD player: you upsample the file first and then send the new file through the Nos. That doesn't convince me though. Because that process in an ordinary computer is usually faster than playing a file. So it is difficult to imagine that upsampling done on the fly is worse in quality than when you convert the file beforehand. I am definitely not into the technical aspects of these things, I just try to apply my simple kind of logic to it...

Dear Mani, I am using a Toslink connection by Oehlbach, the German Hifi cable company, to connect the Touch with the Octave. But to be honest I didn't do any comparisons with other cables. I am rather skeptical if that'll make such a huge difference in the digital domain. And I also didn't find any articles in the net about if RCA or Toslink is preferable with the Touch. Any suggestions?