Zp 24/96

I notice that there are a handful of streaming service offering lossless CD rips, for a higher monthly fee.
It's been possible to buy a year's subscription to Deezer Elite (Red Book FLAC) for the same price as other lossy services.

about streaming of Hi res music. Is this available anywhere today?

AFAIK no, though TIDAL have announced an intention to support MQA, which as I understand it offers ultrasonics 'folded' below the 16-bit noise floor of a 24/48 (or 24/44.1) stream. Given that Sonos have said there could be an argument for greater bit depth but "the math just isn’t there" for increased sample rate, MQA seems to go in quite the wrong direction. As those which have followed this saga know, inaudible ultrasonics could potentially give rise to audible intermodulation distortion in follow-on electronics.

Some are wildly speculating that MQA might be a factor in Apple's alleged interest in TIDAL, but that's hard to see. Apart from its strictures on 'authenticated' production techniques it's a codec, and it's highly doubtful that MQA would have given TIDAL an exclusive on that.

about streaming of Hi res music. Is this available anywhere today?

AFAIK no

Thanks for that confirmation. I suspect that it is because both to support the overhead of such a service and to maintain pricing that doesn't destroy the HD downloads at fancy prices market, pricing would have to be such that few will subscribe to it.

I don't miss this, and I suppose time will tell how things pan out here in the streaming services side of the industry.

I gather that Qobuz does offer hi res streaming via their Sublime subscription but never looked into it.

I gather that Qobuz does offer hi res streaming via their Sublime subscription but never looked into it.
http://www.qobuz.com/gb-en/plans/music-streaming-subscription says "Stream your purchases in 24-Bit Hi-Res". So it sounds like you have to buy them first, rather than "HiRes" being available for on-demand streaming. Other than that the streaming catalogue is CD-quality 16/44.1.

My experience of Qobuz -- albeit 2 years ago -- was decidedly mixed. Leaving aside the holes in the catalogue, the service was too unreliable. Quite how they'd cope with streaming 24/192 one can only speculate....

So not quite a streaming service, I could never find any music either. Happy though with the audio quality from Apple and the recomendations work well for me.

Hesitate to revive this epic thread, but has anyone read the new AES study (literature review more accurate?) that purports to show that "perceived fidelity of an audio recording and playback chain can be affected by operating beyond conventional resolution"? (at a rate slightly higher than flipping a coin). You can download it for free http://www.aes.org/journal/

This is an interesting paper. Not so much that it settles this issue (there is no smoking gun), but that it points out experimental design inconsistencies and issues in the body of studies that have been published.

This is an interesting paper. Not so much that it settles this issue (there is no smoking gun), but that it points out experimental design inconsistencies and issues in the body of studies that have been published.

I especially like the fact they didn't use results from the most famous Hires experiment ever, Boston Audio Society's E.B. Meyer and D.R. Moran's, "Audibility of a CD-Standard A/D/A Loop Inserted into High-Resolution Audio Playback". The reasoning is rich; he basically says the recordings used by some in M&M did not have any hypersonic content, and thus their methodology was not sound. Well, duh! M&M were asking "golden ear" types to prove they heard something while blind testing "high resolution" content they themselves picked as being superior vs. the same material in a 16/44.1 bottleneck. The fact that there was no hypersonic content in the tracks they picked as superior is the fault of the "golden ears", not the testing method. Basically, M&M asked "trained listeners" who claimed they heard something to put up or shut up, and they were shut up. The fact the content they claimed was there was not really there on some recordings is a plus for their findings of listener bias and placebo effect, not a negative.

Reading through the HydrogenAudio thread is great. Seems the Pono player has a severe rolloff filter at 10 KHz (-0.5dB) and at 20 KHz (-5.0 dB) whereas the norm is a -0.5 dB at 20 KHz. A higher sample rate on the Pono moves that rolloff outside of the audible range, so there may actually be an audible difference due to the hardware design.

So the Pono has a hardware design which artificially makes hires sound a bit better! Well, spank my butt and call me Slappy!

Neil Young has put his catalog back on Spotify and Apple Music. Guess he didn't believe what he was preaching about HiRes after all, lol.

http://www.spin.com/2016/11/neil-youngs-music-is-back-on-spotify-and-apple-music/

I guess it doesn't help when his highly touted "hires" music player is a flop and lost to an iPhone 6 in a blind listening test.