I missed a call when I was showering this morning. It was producer Elliot Mazer (right) asking me to visit him at the Music Giants booth, where he and Halcro’s Philip O’Hanlon (left) had something they wanted to me to see (and hear). Music Giants specializes in hi-rez music downloads and Elliot, it turns out, has been spending a lot of time working on transcoding SACD masters to 24/96 or 24/88.2 LPCM for record companies who are starting to realize that they might not ever get back their investment in the new formats from sales of physical discs.
At CEDIA, the two had a system based on Windows Media Player running on an inexpensive PC feeding a Wadia DAC, which in turn fed a headphone amp driving Shure’s new E500PTH in-ear headphones. The hi-rez files were encoded as WMA lossless files and sounded very sweet. Even with variable bit rate lossless encoding, the bit rate for Miles Davis’s "Blue In Green" was, according to the WMA display, a thumping 2609 kbps.
With current music servers providing CD quality music around the home, Music Giants feels that it’s time to take the hi-rez step, and has signed contracts with a number of high-profile custom-install companies.
