WHERE LISTENING TESTS GO WRONG

It is more than four years since I published an editorial in which I explained why most of the so-called ‘hi-res’ music available is not ‘hi-res’ at all, but rather a complete waste of your money and Internet bandwidth. I don’t want to re-hash that editorial here, that’s what the Internet is for, so you can read it at if you’ve forgotten it or didn’t read it in the first place. What I’d like to say in this editorial is that, rather disappointingly, nothing has changed in the intervening years: The fact remains that most of the music being sold as ‘hi-res’ was not recorded at high resolution in the first place, so can have no information in it at all that was beyond the capability of the original recording equipment to capture. The fact also remains that pretty-much all of the so-called ‘pure’ DSD recordings available spent a considerable amount of their life in PCM format, so anyone who claims that DSD sounds ‘better’ than PCM is basing that claim on music that was ‘degraded’ to PCM before being re-encoded as DSD… and in this case you really can’t put humpty together again.