I. Introduction
How reliable are online stores selling high-resolution music files, such as HD-Tracks, Presto Music, Channel Classics and so on? Nowadays, I almost completely stopped buying CD and instead heavily rely on them. Most of the time, I'm able to hear great performance immediately in good sound quality. Unfortunately, I sometimes find downloaded files to be faulty or damaged. While I have purchased more than 1500 CDs, I have never encountered such problems except for physically damaged second-hand CDs.
II.The risk of faulty files
1. An example of a faulty file
The figure below is an example of damaged file. It shows 18:25 to 19:05 of the first movement of the Bruckner's third symphony from Riccard Chailly's complete Bruckner's symphonies, which I bought from Presto Music.
We can clearly find a blank around 18:33 to just before 18:35, marked with red square. It means that the sound suddenly disappears for about one second. This might sound a just petty problem, but I'm sure that everyone can notice the fault. The music is suddenly cut off when it is moving toward the powerful and impressive ending of the first movement. Just to be sure, I re-downloaded the file to check if the damage is caused by download issues.
So, what is the file supposed to be like? The second figure shows the same part of the recording from an undamaged file. We can clearly find the sound that supposed to be exist between 18:33 to 18:35. I can show this because I had already bought separate album of Bruckner's third symphony by Chailly and Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin*1, which is the identical recording included in the complete Brcukner album that contains faulty file.
I haven't told Presto Music the problem of the complete album yet, so be aware if you want to buy the comlplete symphonies album. By the way, Chailly's Bruckner is really great. His Bruckner third might be the best one playing the third (1889) version of the symphony.
2. Overall risk of faulty files from my experience
So how often I encounter this sort of problem? Here is the chart. The left shows the name of store. The middle row shows the number of albums containing faulty files and the right row shows the number of albums I purchased at each store.
| stores | album w. faulty files | total albums purchased |
| HD tracks | 1 | 396 |
| Presto Music | 4 | 135 |
| Channel Classics | 0 | 24 |
| e-onkyo | 0 | 13 |
| Native DSD | 0 | 7 |
| mora | 0 | 3 |
Table 1: Overall risk of faulty files
The risk tends to be fairly low except for Presto Music. My experience seems to show that the risk of faulty files is not negligible when purchasing at Presto Music. Indeed, both Pearson's chi-square test and Fisher's exact test show that compared with HD tracks, the risk of getting faulty is significantly higher in Presto Music.
| stores | album w. faulty files | album wo. faulty files | Total |
| HD tracks | 1 | 395 | 396 |
| Presto Music | 4 | 131 | 135 |
| Total | 5 | 526 | 531 |
| Pearson Chi-Square test | 7.9295 | Pr=0.995 |
| Fisher's exact test | 0.016 | |
| One sided Fisher's exact test | 0.016 |
Table 2: Statistical test of HD tracks and Presto Music's fauty file risk
3. Is Presto Music riskier?: Where the risk exists
Despite of above data, it is too hasty to conclude that Presto is actually more dangerous than other sites. First, I haven't purchased enough from sites other than HD tracks and Presto Music. Therefore, I might be simply lucky enough when purchasing from sites other than these two.
Moreover, Presto Music has a remarkable feature that they sell a large amount of CD quality files, which originally has been sold as CD (or LP record) but not remastered for high resolution file download. Typically, options for purchasing this kind of recording are buy a CD or download CD quality files at Presto Music. I'm not sure how they produce or obtain master files for this type of recording, but the process seems to be different from that of recent recordings where the labels provide hi-res master files to the stores. In fact, three out of four albums containing faulty files are this kind of files. Excluding this type of files, pure risk of getting faulty hi-res or high resolution mastered file download is about one in 150 to 200 albums.
IV. What to do when you find a faulty file
Although I've been unlucky enough to find three albums with faulty files within three months, I've been very much satisfied with their customer service's job (that's why I'm still purchasing files from them). When I contacted Presto Music and HD tracks about the faulty files, both stores' customer services were nice, prompt and offered me satisfactory options. Since we cannot remove the risk entirely, good customer service might be realistic way for handling the risk.
So, if you unfortunately find your downloaded files to be faulty, do not shy away from contacting them. Even if you don't think yourself as a good English writer, which I myself is not, I advise you not to hesitate. The people in charge of customer service are pretty good at understanding not so well-written English emails.
V. Conclusion
- Although small, overall download purchase of audio files (including non hi-res and hi-res files) have a higher risk of faulty files compared to purchasing CD.
- The large part of the faulty file risk comes from CD quality files whose process for generating and providing master files seems to be different from hi-res made/remastered files. My experience suggests that sometimes an error occurs in the process of producing master files and/or a lack of reliable checking process, especially for Presto Music.
- Hi-res files entail smaller faulty file risk than CD quality files but the risk is still higher than CD. The risk is small enough for normal listeners: if you buy an album per month, you will find a broken file once in roughly ten to fifteen years. But for maniac music lovers, the risk is not negligible.
*1:At the time of the recording, the orchestra's name was Radio-Symphonie-Orchester Berlin (until 1993), which is completely different orchestra from Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin.
