Hi-Res Audio, fact or fiction ?

A few months ago I came across two distinct productions from Trevor Horn ( producer ) who made  a set of albums . First one was " Trevor Horn Reimagines The Eighties ".

How this thing had escaped my views all this time alludes me but nonetheless it had and I was thrilled to find and listen to it. There's even an instrumental special CD of the same thing. WOW. The orchestra he had gathered to record these songs is just stunning and makes it all worth of having this ins the most pristine version available , just to appreciate the work of all the musicians more, after all, encoding sounds to make them smaller and smaller to fin in your back pocket is actually killing the music industry alongside... ponder about that !

Can't find it!

Sadly it's not easy to find any original CD let alone any digital rendition of this work that's worth listening to as the only versions I could find were bad MP3's and we all know how bad MP3 quality is ( no data over 16 kHz ). So this leaves me still out on the prowl for the best versions. If you have any, let me know, drop a message below please :)

Shortly after I embarked on a journey to find more of Trevor's Albums I found another one, called Echoes Ancient & Modern. Another great album with amazing songs by just as much amazing artists.

This album sparked a renewed interest in Trevor Horn and his bands. We all know Trevor Horn as the ultimate sonic architect of the 1980s. He is an absolute perfectionist whose legendary productions for Grace Jones, Seal, and Frankie Goes to Hollywood are world-renowned for their incredible depth, dynamics, and high-fidelity standards.

My absolute favorite track on the album is track 4: Slave To The Rhythm, featuring the truly magnificent and soulful voice of Lady Blackbird. Before diving into the album, I caught a short promoclip of her singing this track on her Instagram page.  Check out the link next to this article. 

You'll agree with me that this  sounds absolutely stunning—raw, crystal clear, and pure goosebumps.

So I hooked up a Tidal account to check out their offerings in 24 Bit 192 kHz.

However, when I streamed the full track via Tidal in the highest available 'Max' resolution (24-bit / 192 kHz), something went horribly wrong.

Around the 01:50 mark, the song builds up to its grand climax. The orchestra swells, the synthesizers pump... and suddenly, the sound completely collapses. Lady Blackbird’s vocals begin to suffer from heavy, harsh digital distortion, as if the microphone or the master bus simply couldn't handle the incoming volume.

As a Sound Studio Technician, I know for a fact that a perfectionist like Trevor Horn would never willingly or knowingly let a track roll out of his studio in this state. So I decided to investigate. Was this the victim of a lazy digital distribution script, or did something break deep inside the mastering chain? Probably the latter as after having made a recording of the stream in 24 bit 192 kHz, the contents of that recording were also 16 bit 44.1 kHz.

Check the files out for yourself, the links are next to the article. I cannot hear any difference or improvement, can you? Because, despite of their label, they are both the same file.

This is the image created by a spectrogram analyzer (Spek) to see what was happening under the hood. What appeared on my screen left me completely speechless... 

As you can see in the image , the file used is a PCM Signed 24-bit 192000 Hz file.. The file itself is 296 Mb and cuts off musically right at the 22 kHz frequency. Above 22 kHz up to 96 kHz there is nothing but  big black void. Digital air... 

Well, establishing this shocking fact is one thing, but the technician in me wanted to know more and so I went on a quest to find out what was really happening .