So I'm starting this here after all that talk was had over in the Antemasque thread about issues regarding the recent Tremulant remasters on Nadie Sound. (page 215 of that thread in Vondelpark)
It was brought to my attention that the Tremulant remasters may have been encoded from a lossy format, resulting in inferior FLAC and WAV files, and subsequently all transcodes from the inferior source. This image was submitted to a What.cd forum indicating the severe truncation of frequencies above 16khz, which is a very common marker of digital audio compression (the removal of audio frequencies to reduce file size). The image is a spectrograph (a graph of frequency energy across a whole track, split into left and right channels) of Cut That City, and compares the original release CD version with the recent Remastered copy. The problem is consistent amongst all three tracks on the remaster.
The original WAV files of the Remaster were also discovered to have the same transcoding problems. These are the WAV files that came direct from the Topspin site, prior to it being uploaded to Bandcamp, which eliminates their encoding process from the problem. User ghj9793 did his own analysis on the source WAV files and found the same problem, illustrated in the image below.
The issue here is that lossless files are being bought and sold at the moment, when in fact that is not what they are. Any purchase of the remaster at this stage is only buying a set of mp3's with a very large file size. To add to that:
Regardless of whether you can hear content above 16KHz or not, the fact that the master is lossy is a serious problem. It means that anyone who downloaded the MP3 version or converted their FLACs to MP3s, has audio that has undergone lossy compression twice. This significantly degrades the quality of the audio in the audible range and can leave noticeable compression artifacts.
