Post Description

Tom Petty- Wildflowers & All The Rest - 24-bit/96kHz [MQA]

It’s easy to think of Tom Petty’s 1994 solo album, Wildflowers, as a cult record — the underdog in a catalog full of bigger and brasher choices, revered for its willingness to forgo the classic Heartbreakers band sound in favor of more abundantly acoustic textures, and for letting down the good-time veil for more personal glimpses into his not always so happy-go-lucky psyche. There’s just one problem with this unified theory of Wildflowers: It was actually a huge freaking hit. Plus, the Heartbreakers ended up being the studio band, essentially, whether it was planned that way or not, and several ofthe album’s songs became concert staples up to Petty’s 2017 death. But we can be forgiven if we misremember just how folky or outright confessional it was. It has so much of that intimacy that it’s the kind of record you want to claim as your secret favorite, even if the real secret may be that it was a smash. The mythology goes deeper than just the album’s qualities; it’s a matter of quantity too. Petty had planned Wildflowers as a double album but was talked into trimming it down to a mere 15-song mini-epic. In that way, it’s attracted the kind of eternal fan speculation that’s surrounded other albums once intended to be doubles, like Paul McCartney’s Red Rose Speedway or ELO’s Secret Messages, both of which were finally released in two-LP expansions in the last couple years. In those cases, though, the dream was that imperfect albums might become masterpieces, unexpurgated. But Wildflowers seemed pretty perfect as it was. Wouldn’t re-additions a quarter-century later risk seeming like getting into the weeds?


[MQA]
MQA werd ontwikkeld door het Engelse audiomerk Meridian om met een beperkte bandbreedte hoge resolutie audiobestanden te kunnen distribueren en streamen. Dit maakt het mogelijk ‘Studio Master’-kwaliteit bestanden te streamen zonder kwaliteitsverlies. MQA is erop uit om muziekinformatie die bij een cd-opname verdwijnt maar wel in een studio geregistreerd wordt, te behouden. De voornaamste oplossing die MQA aanbrengt, is het slimmer verpakken van de informatie. De hi-res data (de exacte audio zoals in de studio opgenomen) blijft behouden, maar zit als het ware verborgen. MQA-compatibele spelers – die wel degelijk op de markt gebracht worden – kunnen die gedetailleerde informatie uit het bestand halen. Software om gebruik te maken van de MQA kwaliteit is bijv Audirvana, Amarra, Roon en JPLAY. Op de website van Audirvana kun je een 30-dagen trial downloaden om kennis te maken met MQA.

Deze posting is voorzien van 10% Par2.