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 April 1, 2009 The Digital Music Revolution: What Download Sites Have to Offer -- Part Six
Once you’re in, the site operates pretty much like ClassicsOnline, with some notable quirks, including the Search function. You can search regular high-definition downloads by genre by selecting Browse: Genres. Select one of 19 genres -- Jazz, say -- and you’ll get a list of six new releases and six featured releases, each with a thumbnail image of the album cover. You might think that’s all that’s available, unless you happen to click on the Browse Genre Artists button at the upper right. Do that, and you’ll be treated to huge lists of albums. There’s apparently no way to search by label or any other parameter. Not all of the HDGiants titles are free of Digital Rights Management (DRM); it would be good to be able to search the ones that were and create a complete list. Perhaps in the future? However, when you click on Browse: Super HD instead of Browse: Genre, you are given a complete list, evidently because those titles number only about 80. I’m told this number will steadily increase throughout 2009. HDGiants uses WMA files, with which I hadn’t had any experience. When I asked an engineer the difference between HDGiants’ regular HD and Super HD, I was told that HD is 16-bit, Super HD 24-bit. In both HD and Super HD, HDGiants offers a wide variety of music genres and labels: Telarc, Verve, PentaTone, Concord Jazz, and many others. And this is also the only site I’ve encountered so far that offers HD downloads of some Sony and EMI titles (e.g., Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon), though none is DRM-free. In fact, it seemed that only about half of all titles are free of DRM (denoted by a circled "DRM" with a slash through it), these mostly jazz and classical. The Super HD store lists a few 5.1-channel downloads. As for actual downloading, HDGiants was easy to use; they have their own download manager. The downloads were slower than from any site I’ve used thus far, though not by much. You may not want to sit there staring at the screen while the download is taking place, but you won’t have time to go out and eat a seven-course dinner, either. I found more audible differences in loading and converting WMA files than I have with any other format. When I downloaded a couple of Bill Evans sets from HDGiants and let iTunes convert them from WMA to Apple Lossless, the results were less than splendid. Focus was off a little and the upper frequencies seemed crushed, brushed cymbals especially being buried in blur. When I then used my favorite converter, dBpoweramp, to convert the same WMA files to AIFF, the results were excellent. All blur was gone, and the recordings sounded somewhere between CD and SACD quality. Playing around some more, I found that HDGiants’ 24-bit Super HD offerings were easily superior to the 16-bit HD versions. I haven’t noticed such an extreme difference at any other site, so it no doubt has to do with the WMA files. After a bit of Googling, I learned that the sound quality of WMA files is a subject of some controversy. Prices vary at HDGiants depending on label and title, but almost every Super HD offering seemed to cost $19.95 -- pricey when compared to HDtracks’ 24/96 files, which cost only $15.95 while offering the same quality and shorter download times. And remember that all HDtracks files are DRM-free. Paying on HDGiants is a little dicey: You set up an account using a major credit card, but the minimum purchase is $20, and you can add money only in increments of $20; at any given time, your account is likely to show a credit. Speaking of HDtracks, they’ve now added more labels, most notably the new CSO Resound, which presents live audiophile recordings of the Chicago Symphony produced by the orchestra itself. I downloaded Bruckner’s Symphony No.7, conducted by Bernard Haitink, and was bowled over by the excellent sound. Rounder is also a somewhat new label for HDtracks, and from them I downloaded the 2008 Grammy Award-winning Raising Sand, with Roger Plant and Alison Krauss. The textures of this very unusual recording are thick and there’s a lot of bass percussion, achieved acoustically and electronically. HDtracks offers only a CD-quality download of Raising Sand -- the album is not yet available in the 24/96 store -- but the clarity and solid imaging were nonetheless most impressive. . . . Rad Bennett
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The website we visit this month
is HDGiants (