Wichita

Takacs version is excellent and not that old (2005), Lindsays is good as well. The Melos Quartet version is a bit forgotten nowadays, but I really like it, both from an interpretative and sound quality perspective, but they are out of print and really expensive, you could probably find them quite easily in public libraries if you want to try them.The Italiano is also excellent, and at bargain basement prices. So much good music, so few days to listen to it...

I will definitely agree with you on that. Hires is more like icing on the cake, whereas mastering can make a world of difference, especially when the source material is good. That said, ECM have excellent quality standards on mastering, which results in much better than average sound quality, so remastering recent works for hires downloads would be rather pointless.

In which case we should probably have two seperate discussions : - is there a tangible benefit in listening to the same master in 24/96 compared to CD quality ? Let us not expect anything final on this... - what is the point of publishing a so so mastering job leading to a brickwalled or less than average quality CD in hires, or is a specific, "more advanced" remastering step necessary in order to benefit from what hires can provide It seems to me what confused some of us came from mixing both discussions into one.

Well I don't want to start an argument, since I am new here. But since we seem to agree on what mastering is, I am trying to understand what you mean by "draw your own conclusion", which is the reason why the discussion started, because it implies something wrong has occurred. In the case of "Somewhere", recorded in June 2009, it is obviously going to be the same mastering for hires and CD, why would the record company do a specific mastering for hires, since the music was probably recorded and mastered in 24/192 in the first place ? So it is not surprising your frequency analysis shows both hires and CD to be of the same origin. Sorry guys, but I don't see your point

Of course downsampling a 24/96 master with Sox will degrade the sound quality, even though it will come from the same master, with the same EQ moves, compression... But it seems to me what you are trying to say is that ECM hires download might be upsampled from the original CD resolution 16/44.1 to 24/96, as shown in the frequncy analysis you made, in which case there would be no point in buying them instead of a CD. As you all know, the debate is still on as some Hires download have been proven to be upsampled. I understand HDTracks are much more cautious now and analyse to some extent what the companies send them, so it's gonna be difficult for me to believe the whole ECM hires catalog could be upsampled ...