Qobuz Hi-Rez Not Necessarily the Best Sound

I guess it goes to show that higher rez files are not necessarily superior sonically.

Modern day remasters suffer from high compression. The goal in the beginning was to make the recording louder for air play and for ear bud listeners. See the Loudness Wars.

When the music recording business transitioned to digital, record labels transferred analogue masters to digital formats, typically 24/96 or 24/192kHz. It was now easy to reissue a remastered album. The use of compression became overused to pump up the volume to make the album stand out against lower volume releases. This decreased dynamic range and made music sound flat and lifeless.

Check out how dynamic range decreased over the years due to compression and digital processing. These so-called remasters were touted as having improved sound. You can see how Depeche Mode's earlier albums had more dynamic range allowing the music to sound lively and less processed.

https://dr.loudness-war.info/?artist=Depeche+mode&album=

I don’t think you can generalize this across all music.  Specifically, I generally find the hi-res versions of newer music sounds better than the 16/44.1 version.  My guess is that with your subset of music recorded in the 70s - 80s you’re open to variables such as the quality of the up-conversion/up-sampling process as well as the quality of the original recording.  But it makes sense that with all the variables in play a particular hi-res version could sound worse.  Maybe that’s why God invented vinyl?

@soix makes a good point. I also find that newer music which has been natively recorded in hires, then mastered at a high sampling rate does often sound better than the "CD quality" version on Qobuz. Music from the 70s, 80s, 90s has been subjected to digital processing from analogue and upsampled. And the provenance of the source must be considered; eg, is it an original analogue master or is a later generation used, or maybe it’s a remaster that’s being used as the source and converted to hires for streaming.

This is another possibility where the album was not subject to the Loudness Wars.

Unfortunately it is rare we can make A to B comparison based on resolution alone.  They tell us very little about the mastering process and what if any changes were made from one release to another.

In a perfect world the masters are released at a high resolution and otherwise untouched as they lower the bit rates.  That is rarely the case, especially for old, remastered stuff.

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