From a sound quality perspective – are digitally downloaded
music stored in solid state memory sounds inferior in comparison to their
physical digital counterparts?
By: Ringo Bones
Ever since legal digital music downloads became a commercially
viable reality that benefited both artists and record labels, it has been
touted by environmentally concerned individuals as a “green” way of selling
music around the world because this means that there are no shipping of CDs and
other physical formats around the world that produce significant amounts of
carbon dioxide emissions. Musical distribution carbon footprint would be
limited to the power used by servers and PCs or other devices used to download
the music and this could be much lower if those devices are powered by
renewably-generated electricity. From an electronic engineering perspective,
digital music stored in solid state memory has “supposedly” eliminated the
problems of digital jitter in comparison to 120-centimeter CD or DVD discs
played in a transport. But why is it that an increasing number of audiophiles
have noticed that downloaded music, more often than not, sounded inferior in
comparison to its physical counterparts?
Ever since the popularity of universal players that are able
to play any 12-centimeter disc – whether it be 16-bit CDs, DVD-video, DVD-audio
and Super Audio CDs – and digitally downloaded music via a USB slot, many
budget conscious audiophiles, including me, had noticed that digitally
downloaded music, even high resolution ones that are in FLAC (Free Lossless
Audio Codec) format tend to sound inferior to their physical format. In my own
experience, using a 150 US dollar Oppo universal player, physical Redbook 16-bit
44.1-KHz sampled CDs tend to sound better than their downloaded 24-bit 192-KHz
FLAC encoded counterparts. The most common recordings that are usually
available in both that can be compared side-by-side using a universal player
are Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue album and Martin Taylor’s Spirit of Django album.
To my ears, it seems as if the downloaded versions sounds as
if it has the sound quality of a typical 100 US dollar CD player while the
physical versions sounds as if it has the sound quality of a typical 500 US
dollar CD player. And to Stereophile magazine leaders, most downloaded music
played on universal players priced between 150 to 500 US dollars via its USB
slot has a digital sound that Stereophile contributor Michael Fremer used to
describe back in the 1990s as “everything gets flattened out – including dynamics.
Given that solid state storage devices supposedly doesn’t have the digital
jitter inherent in CD / DVD / SACD drives, why is it that digitally downloaded music
– even hi-rez ones – sound inferior to their physical counterparts? By the way, digitally downloaded music only
started to sound as good as of better than their physical formats only after I’ve
burned them into their requisite 12-centimeter recordable CD or DVD discs using
a PC with Windows Media Player that can handle FLAC encoded music data.
