*do* you still actually buy CD's?

I strongly believe that, if you are a collector, you should buy/get the actual object of your collection and not the "notion or the content" of the object. Most of the expensive new releases have such extra information or material that cannot be replaced only with a download.  As Foales Arishes mentioned, the recent products of J.Saval on Alia Vox contain packages with books of 200-400 pages each with all kind of info, illustrations, photos etc. Glossa, in its French editions, has most of the Opera or Vocal releases in the form of Book-CDs, with also extremely rich documentation on the rare works one has to encounter.

In other words, the more we go to substitutes, the more we lose the actual object of our collection.

As for the so called controversy about the SACD versus CD, in my equipment (and not only) with all kind of blind or not test, one can notice the differences (wider space, better attaca on the dynamics, clearer definition of the music lines, even better tone of the instruments). And all these in SACD stereo. If you go to the full surround system, then, there cannot be any comparison. However, before I buy my Krell SACD player, when I played them in my Krell CD player, sometimes the SACDs sounded even inferior to CDs! So, each product is to be served by the appropriate equipment. By the way, the SACD format is not dying out at all. All Pentatone, 99% of Channel and Praga, 98% of Linn, 97% of Exton and Triton, almost all the new catalogue of Alia Vox, to mention few basic labels, are in SACD format.

Parla

It is important to understand several things about mp3s. Firstly the mp3 compression process does not follow some kind of agreed algorithm and so different software will use slightly different models to decide what to do and produce slightly different results. Some of these are better than others and e.g. Lame (perhaps the most highly regarded) is continuously being tweaked and developed as the developers find musical examples that don't quite reproduce correctly. Most of their recent work has been on the variable bit rate model which comes in various quality settings.  I assume that Amazon use either the best or next to best of these. The best vbr are probably as good as they need to be.  

Secondly most people don't seem to understand when looking for differences in mp3 versus CDs that any audible issues in high quality mp3 are not there continuously. High bit rate mp3s will not have things like poor bass or tinny sound or noticeably compressed frequency range or other issues that are there continuously. The kinds of problems that occur are on things like occasional, unusual fast transient sounds that don't reproduce correctly with the model being used. These are the kind of thing that the developers are continuously trying to find examples of and use to tweak their compression model. One example I have mentioned before in another thread is castanets - Lame didn't handle these well until perhaps 4 or 5 years ago!

So a priori you cannot rule out that even a very high bit rate mp3 will not contain somewhere an audible difference to the CD, but it unlikely that anyone can detect any differences in long stretches of fairly conventional sounding music. 

Ted

re SACD's. I'm biased but since when could a RBCD have the brass choirs of Berlioz's Requiem (for example) coming at you from all sides? Answer: never.

Any fool can hear on the most cheap of SACD systems how flat stereo sounds compared to MCH & it most certainly is not dying.

I can well believe you have that impression from Gramophone because few (if any) of their reviewers even seem to own a machine much less, a MCH set up which is so much more true-to-life than any stereo system.

See comments below.

Thanks Ted for your further comments. I didn't know a lot of this and found it to be quite interesting and informative!

Must admit (for me anyway), if given the option to get the music uncompressed, that's the one that I will opt for (assuming also that the recording isn't quite old that is).

Best wishes,

Petra

"Live" performances are a different product than the CD. In "Live" performances, you have a specific, predetermined program of a specific nature and character from the "best" available artists. The CD (or SACD) offers all the "other" options plus the additional time of a program prepared by the listener.

In any case, when I was in cities that offer viable "live" performances, I just could opt between them and listening to more and new releases, but not to choose one to the detriment of the other. However, whenever I had to find myself in places that "live" performances could be even an unthinkable wishful thinking, then, my collection along with the new releases were the only option of the best music available, in the best possible form (and format).

Parla

Thanks for the link, Otterhouse.

Much more is to be found on the server: http://download.omroep.nl/avro/klassiek/zoc/

60 mp3's in total, excellent quality (320 kbps). Been looking for a list of content of some sort, but the descriptions appear to be spread all over the site, in news items. Doesn't matter much since you can download them all easily and check the mp3's properties to see what it is. Or just stream anything that you find interesting.