Are these burnable to CDr? Or do you have to link your PC to your Hi Fi?

They are burnable to CDr with the right software but that will automatically downsample them to 44kHz/16-bit which is red book standard. Defeats the point of buying Hi-Res basically.



Indeed. But then, how do we know any Hi-Res files available anywhere aren't upsampled? Warners have done Hi-Res files with The Smiths back catalogue and numerous other very famous bands on their roster. I don't think these are fake but happy to concede that if evidence to the contrary was found.

Yes: all recent-ish NIN releases, some of which were issued as 24/96 (Ghosts in a limited fashion, Hesitation Marks) some at 24/48 (How To Destroy Angels - Welcome Oblivion), are not upsampled, they were released in HD from day one, and you can determine this quite easily using software to plot a spectrogram and see the audio information outside of the 16/44.1 space.

I say "easily" because IMHO telling the difference by actually listening to them is nigh-on impossible.

With remasters, there's some argument that it's worthwhile to issue hi res files, if the remaster was done in a higher domain, and/or if the sources were analogue, and/or if the new mixing/mastering was done on an analogue mixing desk...

In this case, without having heard them yet, I'd be 99.9% sure that these are upsamples of the remasters and there's no audio content outside of the 16/44.1 (or at best, 24/48) space.



I'm certain I couldn't, at least.

For anyone who actually wants to, you *must* do so in a controlled environment and using an (at least) double-blind experiment, ideally using an XXY test. The "squishyball" software can be used to help with this for what it's worth, on Linux hosts at least (no idea if/how it is built for Windows). Description of the XXY test (from the squishyball manual):

"X/X/Y testing is a form of A/B/X testing in which the order of all
samples is randomized and the position of the 'X' sample is not known
ahead of time to be in the third position. In each trial, the user
selects which of sample 1, 2 or 3 is believed to be the sample that is
different from the other two. This test is useful for determining if
any differences are audible between two samples and to what confidence
level. It is a stronger version of the A/B/X test that eliminates
sample order bias."

Edited by user 20 February 2017 02:50:57(UTC)  | Reason: Not specified

Yes. Note that we're talking apples and oranges here; there are clearly audible differences between the original and the 2015 remasters, at the same frequency and bit-depth (16/44.1); the source audio is different. Whereas here we're talking about whether the hi-res files on qobuz (24/96 I think?) are distinguishable from the CD-quality remasters available elsewhere, the source audio is the same.