Digital compression artefacts on some “Hi res” Qobuz albums?

[linnfomaniac83]

I’ve noticed (you couldn’t not notice), some digital compression artefacts on some hi res albums on Qobuz, a couple that spring immediately to mind are Joni Mitchell-Both Sides Now and The Doors-LA woman. The standard versions sound absolutely great but these hi res versions are unlistenable, they sound like an 8bit wav file on a Windows 95 computer. Anyone else experienced similar?

 

[davidsrsb]

Are you sure that this is not water-marking?

 

[linnfomaniac83]

Are you sure that this is not water-marking?

Could be, it’s a high frequency distortion that is particularly prominent on vocals, it sounds awful. The original, non remastered, 16/44 versions of both the albums I mentioned sound superb.

 

[DimitryZ]

I have never encountered it. Could be streaming or decoding issues. I wouldn start by blaming Qobuz.

 

[TLS]

Could be, it’s a high frequency distortion that is particularly prominent on vocals, it sounds awful. The original, non remastered, 16/44 versions of both the albums I mentioned sound superb.

Why would a remastered album be any better than the original?

 

[linnfomaniac83]

Why would a remastered album be any better than the original?

In my experience, they usually aren’t. However a “High res” release shouldn’t be worse than the original. Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite happy listening to the originals but I’m wondering what is the cause of the awful distortion I’ve heard on some albums. It’s pointless them being labelled as high res, or even being listed at all if they’re unlistenable.

 

[davidsrsb]

Joni Mitchell material is especially prone to being messed up as several albums were made with HDCD encoding. Some of these have been further processed, damaging the HDCD flags

 

[chartz]

They totally messed up We Get Requests, such a lovely recording.
I got my money back but they didn’t do anything about it.

Worse, CDs with pre-emphasis sound horrible because they didn’t bother treating them as such - which is proof that the origin of some files are CDs, as I always suspected.

 

[AndyU]

Why would a remastered album be any better than the original?

.. particularly as the original master tapes might be 40 years old and have lost oxide, stretched, suffered print through and print forward .,,

But in general I have found current hires albums on Qobuz to be absolutely superb.

 

[AndyU]

Are you sure that this is not water-marking?

Grenadier_45 recently compared a Qobuz stream to the cd and found no evidence of watermarking; Qobuz and the cd were the same data.

I've just set up a trial with Qobuz. Performed the same test - captured the digital feed to computer, and then compared it through Audio Diffmaker.

Result? >300dB null. That means whatever Qobuz are streaming is identical to my CD copy, and no watermarking... Obviously this doesn't prove Qobuz aren't watermarking anything, and I'll test some more albums over the coming weeks of the trial, but based on this recording, it seems Qobuz might be worth the subscription.

As an aside, the tracks aren't identical in length - both the Tidal and Qobuz stream capture files have approximately 5s longer at the beginning compared to the CD, for some reason.

Hope this little exercise helps others.

 

[davidsrsb]

Some UMG CDs are alleged to be water marked these days.

 

[lordsummit]

I thought that qobuz didn’t watermark. It’s one of the reasons that it sounds so much better to my ears than Tidal. Don’t quote me on that. I’d be checking my output options. How are you doing it?

 

[Stunsworth]

Not a problem I've ever noticed.

 

[mattgbell]

I thought that qobuz didn’t watermark. It’s one of the reasons that it sounds so much better to my ears than Tidal. Don’t quote me on that. I’d be checking my output options. How are you doing it?

The watermarking, where it exists, is done by the music companies, not the streaming services. Basically Qobuz (or whoever) are stuck with whatever the music companies supply them. When I asked Qobuz customer support about watermarking, that was what they told me: Not our problem; if you want to complain, then complain to UMG.

Having said that, the last time I looked into this was about 18 months ago, and things may have moved on since then.