hvaleton

@Manelus: What do you mean by "brickwalled SACD conversion"? If the frequency content does not exceed 22 kHz it seems to me we're dealing with an upsampled cd-rip. (granted: it could also be a rip from the Redbook layer of a SACD...) Anyway, I can confirm your findings. This is definitely not HD. And to think I paid good money for this download from Itrax. I'm confused: If Itrax gets its source material directly from the record label (in this case: Harmonia Mundi) then there would be no need to pass an upsampled cd-rip as genuine HD? Yesterday I read some comments by Mark Waldrep on the Itrax forum. Interesting stuff. He's very adamant about HD. But if he's the one in control at Itrax and he is so keen on 100% HD-ness of the Itrax downloads on offer, how can this be? What's also puzzling me is the fact that on this particular Handel organ concertos download, the various movements of each concerto have been put together to create one file per concerto. This must have been done after the rip, I assume, since most ripping software produce one file per track. So I needed to split the file up using WaveLab. I started my splitting with Opus 7/2 but fairly soon I found some strange artefacts in the waveform. Precisely at the point where I wanted to place a split marker, I found a click! Perhaps this is the point where two tracks have been "glued together" after the ripping had been done? But why do that? And why in such a clumsy way? (see attached screenshot from Wavelab) Of course I did also audition this concerto in a comparison with the 16bit 44,1kHz CD-rip that I also happen to own and I could certainly hear no quality improvement going from CD to "HD". Not that I had expected that... This is the first time I downloaded anything from Itrax, so I'm not sure in what format the other downloads are offered, but this one is in .wav. Why's that? It takes twice as long to download as a flac and the quality is identical. Anyway, this has not been a reassuring experience, to put it mildly.