how to get high quality music?

[shiftyape]

i am getting the sennheiser hd 598 in about a week. While it gets here, i want to upgrade my music library from itunes compressed songs to high quality audio. question?
where do i get that high quality music? (dont want to pay again) also, i am wondering if youtube has high quality sound. say for example this song: https/www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaAWdljhD5o
how exactly do you tell how high quality the audio is on a song? thanks guys.

 

[thee_prisoner]

I don't use iTunes but since you payed for it already, see if it has an option to upgrade the songs to a "lossless" format, Apple uses ALAC. Also FLAC is good.

At least you have started out with some decent headphones but to get the best quality, you need a good source material, probably an external DAC and etc.

how exactly do you tell how high quality the audio is on a song? The sound quality of a song can become complicated but one thing you can do is right click on a song, go into properties and check the bit rate. If the bit rate is low, that means they had to compress it and cut off some of the quality.

It also depends on what music you listen to. If you listen to a lot of classical, jazz, vocals, acoustic music, you may want a good quality setup. Otherwise you may not hear a big difference.

On youtube, some people upload a higher quality bitrate then others but I wouldn't use youtube as a good source of good sound, especially the song you linked to.

Happy listening, the Prisoner...

 

[shiftyape]

what about the vevo song recordings? any way to tell the bitrate of those?
i checked and most of my songs are mp3 and have a 128kb bitrate. is this good?
ive heard that .wav is good quality is there any way to convert youtube to .wav?

 

[americanaudiophile]

You cannot upgrade a file just by converting it from one type to another. A file that has lossy compression like MP3, when you convert it to FLAC will not recover the missing data and will sound the same as the mp3.
Basically the only streaming music services that are CD quality are Tidal and Deezer.(both in beta)
CD quality files are 16bit 44.1khz (this is word length and sampling rate). Higher than CD quality files are 24bit with 48khz, 88khz, 96khz or 192khz sampling rate. They can be WAV which is uncompressed or, FLAC, or ALAC files which are compressed but in a lossless way so no data is lost. There are also DSD files which are use to make SACD discs and can be purchased as downloads from some record companies.
No legal free way to upgrade your files.

 

[shiftyape]

thanks for answering, i will take this under advisement.

 

[Yoder54]

As pointed out above, there is not way to go from a "low" quality mp3 to a higher quality audio sample. There are also other ways besides the few mentioned above to format your audio. The Windows audio codecs were mentioned, but the OS X codecs not. FLAC audio goes both ways quite easily. AIFF is Apple's lossless equivalent of WAV, the only difference is how the metadata handled. There is also Apple Lossless Audio Codec, ALAC with the extension m4v. M4V is Apple's equivalent of FLAC. Using both Windows, OS X, and Android devices makes it a challenge to find the ultimate lossless codec that will play with everything.

When I get a Red Book CD, then I always burn a copy of it (iso) to use as my play disk and keep the original in a safe place. I also burn both AIFF, and FLAC files. It may seem like a lot of work, but when only do a disk at a time then it is no big deal. You will be amazed at how much more music you can get on a player if you use m4v or FLAC files. The lossless format also makes a big difference in the quality of the audio. In fact, you may want to go to some place like HD Tracks and download some hi-resolution audio. If you have the equipment, then you will be impressed. Do be aware of the fact, that just because it is hi-resolution does not always mean that it will sound good. It all gets down to the sound engineer who mixes the final product. I have purchased some "re-mastered" audio that has been trash, but I have downloaded a lot of hi-rez that has been worth the purchase price.

If you want to try some very high quality CD audio, then go to Mobile Fidelity's site. They have some hybrid CD's and do excellent work at remastering their audio products. The CD's are not cheap though.