It continues to be a source of personal frustration and annoyance that music fans and audiophiles continue to be misinformed about the audio fidelity of various music releases through digital downloads or physical sound file delivery (DVD-Rs with 176.4 or 192 kHz - 24-bit files). "So-called" standard definition, analog master tracks have been elevated to the status of High Definition or High Resolution by various companies for the past few years…starting with the now extinct MusicGiants.com (AKA HDGiants.com), who's marketing tag was "HD Music Downloads". Unfortunately, almost nothing in their catalog was in fact High Definition. They featured a multitude of recordings taken straight from CDs and second-generation analog masters (safety copies) licensed from the major labels. Their claim was that their downloadable files were "higher resolution" than the same tracks on iTunes or other digital music download sites so somehow they qualified as "HD". This was at best wishful thinking and at worse outright fraud. Thankfully, customers were unimpressed with the charade and the company went down in flames. The sad part is potential customers seeking recordings with better fidelity were left confused and disappointed.

However, the same marketing shell game continues. So in the interest of full transparency and accurate disclosure, I thought it would be a good idea to begin a database of spectragraphs showing the actual frequency response of selected downloaded tunes so that you can judge for yourself if you want to invest in these tracks. I will be publishing the actual spectragraphs that I have done on a variety of tracks…some that exhibit tremendous frequency extension and some that suffer from technical limitations in the source tracks and therefore don't have any high frequencies at all. This is just about frequency response and accuracy in identifying something as HD. I've done the same exercise on tracks from the Beatles and they too suffer from the limitations of the technology of the time…but they are still some of my favorite music.

I'm using Sonic Visualiser (a free download) and SoundBooth from Adobe to do these analyses. You can do the same analysis with these software programs.

There has been a lot of press including a lot of mainstream press extolling the "historic release" of the ABKCO Rolling Stones catalog in "HD" downloadable format on HDTracks.com. I downloaded the first self-titled album and put it to the test. Here's the results:

The scale on this graph is time along the x-axis and frequency (displayed in log format) along the y-axis. The intensity of the green signal is directly correlated to the amount of energy that exists at that frequency. As you can see, this track doesn't extend beyond 14 kHz, which obviously doesn't require an 88.2 kHz sample rate! Why would anyone invest from $20 to $30 to get a digital version of something that is unambiguously standard definition? Probably the same thing that keeps some audiophiles putting green magic marker on the edges of their CD to improve the quality of the sound.

The Rolling Stones early catalog may be the presented in the best possible fidelity we've ever been able to acquire, but these are not "HD" and should not be classed with tracks that actually do have extended frequency response. Here's an example of a track from Laurence Juber's award-winning album "Guitar Noir" that does show extended high frequencies. In fact, the top extends to near 37 kHz, something that is not possible to reproduce using analog tape or vinyl.

Every week, I'll put up another track and try to put some reality back into the debate on whether a track is HD or not.