Janomatic

Hi Clemens, do you think you could give us a quick summary of what Norman has written to you without giving away information that was intended for yourself only? I would love to know what his thoughts on the matter are. Jan

Hi Everybody, I feel that there is lot of information out there that does relate to VAT and imports but what most people do not realize is that what is correctly cited here is referring to the transfer of physical goods coming in via hand luggage (think of airline travellers coming from another country) and parcel services (DHL, UPS, FedEx and so on) who fall under different regulations than downloaded goods. For those there is no minimum value as technicallities as the custom's office actually charging you and the manpower that entails are not an issue when everything is done electronically. To follow that thought HD-Tracks would really tell everybody that they they do not feel bound by their licensing agreements when they would start collecting VAT for foreign countries. I actually tend to speak to the people at Warner or EMI quite regularly and they simply don't have the impression that there is people out there who want to buy HighRes Downloads in sensible numbers. Please remember that these companies have in many cases stopped selling SACDs because consumer demand was too low to justify the additonal cost of mastering for SACD and doing separate discs. Also keep in mind that many of the HD-Tracks downloads are not coming directly from the labels who most often don't even have a High-Res version available but are transcoded from DVD-A or SACD releases that have been available in the past already. The sad truth of the matter is that most recordings even though they might have been done in 24 Bit resolution and High Sampling Rates in the past simply have never been transferred to the label in this resolution as the label only requested 16/44.1 and if there was an SACD release this would have been authored by an outside company. It might be possible for the people in the studio to find or re-create a higher resolution mix but they would certainly charge the label for this extra work and then the label has to answer the following three questions: 1. Will we ever sell enough of these downloads to make good on the additonal investment? 2. Will releasing this mean we can expect fake DVD-As popping up all over Asia and come into the hands of our customers with the promise of sounding better than the orignal CDs we sell them? 3. Do the contracts of the band state that there can be other versions beside the CD or LP version that was part of the contract? And if so what percentage of the revenue generated with these downloads will go to the artist and which part will remain with the label financing the project? (If you are a lawyer you will see that different countries, contracts and uses of the music make a total mess of any answer to question three!) Neither question is all that easy to answer. Jan

... you may want to think about WHY HD-Tracks is not offering the recordings to you. We can all be reasonably sure that they would like to do that as they have often done that in past even though they claimed they won't on their website. They did also not close the PayPal route for a long time and it seems it still is open in some ways. The simple fact is that they are not allowed to sell most of the music they license from other companies internationally. That has got many different reasons. For example it is possible that the company giving them digitial distribution rights for a certain title does not even own the righs in other countries. Then there is three other issues involved that make it close to impossible for HD-Tracks to sell to EU countries legally even if the labels allow them to do just that. 1. VAT has to be paid in the country of the recipient. That means they would have to add the VAT of the country where the recipient is located and add that on top and then transfer this amount to that country. That may be possible somehow but is nothing a small venture should set out to do. 2. The mechanicals (also know as the copyright fees for the authors) have also to be paid to the organization representing the author of that work in the country where the purchaser is located. Imagine having to deal with individual licensing agencies who all have different calculation models and doing this for each individual song. Oh - and don't forget you need to calculate this into the price of the song that you are going to offer. Thus prices will vary depending on where you are. 3. Customs. It may seem totally strange but technically you are purchasing a license and those fall under custom's regulations. Thus the recipient (the downloader!) would have to pay an additional fee at customs for the music purchased. Obviously the reality of this is debatable but a business model based on the "circumvention" of import duties can get you into legal problems with the very companies that are issuing the licenses you need to survive. So if you now consider that you cannot download from iTunes in the US when from Europe you have understood why there is an iTunes in Europe and why pricing does actually vary from country to country when shopping there. In reality things simply are not as easy as they seem and only because we have got the internet now that does not mean the legal structure of how business is conducted in countries will follow that business model any time soon. Obviously there is a way around this problem which is simply to buy physical media like SACDs and LPs. You pay VAT and Customs when receiving them according to the regulations of the country you are in and the mechanicals have been paid in the country of manufacture as otherwise production could not commence. Technically the companies taking care of author's rights could claim additonal compensation but in reality this has not been happening for decades for products where it is to be assumed that everything has been paid (think of Japan, US, GB but not China or Thailand or Vietnam). So will the record labels wake up and see the light any time soon? Unlikely. None of the download companies offering "High-Res" really publishes sales figures but I would assume that the revenues generated by a single number one hit sold as a lossy download by a major label will easily generate a larger revenue than worldwide sales of all titles that all the "High-Res" websites offer combined in a year. I wrote something like this to Chris many many month ago and he published some of these thoughts on this website. Jan

I feel that we have had SACD for about 12 years now and have not seen this product get into the mass market even though it is backward compatible (Hybrid-SACD) and does offer Stereo and Surround Options and can be collected and re-sold and is a physical good after all. There certainly is a large enough niche for people who want "better than CD quality" offerings but it is not big enough to convince even the companies who sell music as their main business that the market is big enough to release on SACD regularly. Right now we see the exact opposite as happening. Instead of selling higher quality as physical goods or downloads more and more streaming services with "lower than CD quality" are coming up and are heralded as the next big thing. Music business is on the road to convenience over quality and has been on that path for a long time now. That said there are a few labels that make great sounding records and maybe it is just about us audiophiles supporting those labels instead of hoping that the mass market will one day see the light. Jan

Hi Chris, you are the one person that should be aware that Apple could have offered lossless downloads in CD resolution for years now and has not done though even though all Apple hardware and software should easily support this. I am pretty sure the sonic advantage of Apple Lossless over AAC are of a bigger magnitude than the step from CD to higher resolution formats and the best thing is that there is ALWAYS a CD resolution version available. So shouldn't the question be why Apple does not even release Apple Lossless Music in the first place? And is the very simple answer that it simply is not their business model to offer products for a niche market when they envision themselves with millions of paying customers in their cloud services and the idea of having streaming content in lossless format from the cloud simply is not appealing to them. Best regards, Jan

So if it sounds "a bit more interesting" I would guess the reason is that for the DVD-A the multitracks have been re-worked to generate a new mix. Thus you are actually listening to a different mix which brings the comparison between the 16 Bit and the 24 Bit version more in the realm of "previous mix" and "mix done for the DVD-A". Jan

Hi otisbass, considering that the original release is from 1982 we can be absolutely sure that it was not recorded in 24 Bit back then. The production was done in digital and a later DVD-A had multichannel and high resolution versions on it. It is quite possible that the original 16 Bit Multitrack files have been used to generate something new in 24 Bit. This way you don't loose resolution in mixing but obviously you still don't have a real 24 Bit file per se regarding dynamic levels. The worldlength tells you very little about the sound quality but this title has been an audiophile favourite for quite some time so I imagine it will sound good regardless of bitlength. The Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab LP is long out of print but sounds quite wonderful. Jan

Hi Chris, do you think you could install a counter that could be activated by members clicking on it for something like: I would like to download high resolution music from Pink Floyd and I would be willing to pay at least US$ 20 for each album. I wonder how long it would take to find a sizeable amount of people that could convince EMI to offer something like this if it turns out it takes a long time to find a thousand people who would want this from a band like Pink Floyd that would tell us something about the real size of this market. Jan

Hi Chris,<br /> I must have made a less than clear explanation. <br /> <br /> I am trying to say that it is quite likely that the people releasing this album as a DVD-Video did upsample from 24/48 to 24/96 and the main reason for this may have been that they did not even think to cater to audiophiles but simply wanted something playable with the bonus Video Disc. Thus a user can have both the music and the added bonus of the video documentary on one disc and does not have to exchange discs in his universal player. On some players it may even sound better than the Red-Book CD.<br /> <br /> Thus I am really trying to say that even though the press release calls this "audiophile" as this is an "audiophile format" it is unlikely that the producers thought about the audiophile community when doing this production.<br /> <br /> Jan

Dear Everybody,<br /> Chris mentioned that his package contained a CD and a DVD-Video disc. As some of you might remember the DVD-Video specification does allow for 24/96 Stereo Sound with no picture and in the past a few discs like this were offered by companies like Chesky and Classic Records. The benefit of this disc is that it will play on any DVD-Video player and should work just as well on any Blu-Ray Player. As both DVDs and Blu-Ray is working with 48 Khz base sampling frequencies it may be entirely possible that one of these machines does give a better sound in playback compared to the standard CD with its 44,1 Khz sampling frequency. Thus the idea may have been to give "Joe Sixpack" a better sound when he uses his one universal player and I think that is quite laudable. It is rather unlikely anybody thought of the tiny community of computer audiophiles who would rip the disc to play it back on their computers.<br /> <br /> Jan

The Answer is really quite simple. These discs are fakes. In China and especially on e-bay in Hong Kong you will find countless CDs that claim they are SACD and XRCD and HDCD and Gold Discs all at the same time. The more funny logos the better. So what you have bought there simply is a copy of a disc or a compilation of various discs for which neither the artist nor his label nor the copyright holder will ever have been paid.

Hi everybody, this discussion has been around for a long time in the audiophile community. What many people fail to mention though is that even differences that are objectively measurable are not neccessarily detectable in an ABX-Test. Especially tests in which one would need to identify relatively small differences seem to be rather difficult to pass. Have a look at this very simple ABX-Test which will take about three to five minutes of your time: www.sieveking-sound.de/abx It was designed to emulate the process of taking a test in which gaps do appear as you would imagine it to happen when exchanging components in a Hifi system. The test seems to be very humbling for many individuals because the users set their identification threshold themselves and then often find out that the thing they were so sure about before suddenly becomes very difficult to identify in an ABX-Environment. Have fun doing the test. It is not a matter of life and death but is supposed to give some perspective. Jan