This varies slightly from product to product but one characteristic is present on pretty much anything we test and that is that it can handle resolutions and sampling rates that are far in advance of that on a CD – a thirty plus year old benchmark that we seem curiously reluctant to part with.
There are reasons for this. The first is that as benchmarks go, it’s a pretty solid one. A well mastered CD can sound staggeringly good and the notional thresholds of human hearing are something that are well within reach of a 16/44.1 file. The second is that music has first had to go backwards to go forwards. We’re coming out of the compressed music era – the limits that existed on bandwidth and storage no longer exist so the ‘big deal’ is we’re back up to CD sized files for streaming.
But if there is no technical need to have more bandwidth and information than CD, why bother? The answers to this are an article in themselves but the long and the short of it is that the extra information – if handled and decoded correctly – can be used to create a signal that we perceive to be more natural and less processed. On a more basic level, the effort of creating these files means that more effort goes into their mastering which in turn generally improves performance too.
As such, there’s no better time to dip a toe in the waters of Hi-Res. There’s a bewildering selection of choice available in terms of genres and sample rates and some of it you don’t even need to pay for. This list is far from exhaustive and it has no DSD titles on it. The reason for this is simple enough. These ten albums will work pretty much regardless of the hardware and equipment you have so they can be recommended without concerns over whether they will work or not.

Artist: Jewel
Title: Picking Up The Pieces
Year Of Release: 2015
Label: Concord Sugar Hill
Genre: Pop Folk, Country, Acoustic, Singer-songwriter
Quality: FLAC (tracks) [24Bit/48kHz]
Total Time: 01:02:36
Total Size: 770 MB (d. booklet)
WebSite: Album Preview

Picking Up the Pieces is Jewel's 14-track LP through Sugar Hill Records. She self-produced the record - with her first producer, the late Ben Keith, always in mind – and hired a band comprised mostly of Neil Young collaborators to help her strip away the veneer she’d built up over two decades in the music business.
“This is just me. These are my thoughts. These are my feelings. This is my poetry,” Jewel said. “It really felt like returning to a part of me that I didn’t mean to lose, but with time and relationships and life and surviving and dealing, you take on new things and not all of them are great.”
The last five years have been full of change, both personal and creative, for the 41-year-old Alaska-born singer. Her 4-year-old son Kase was born, but her marriage fell apart. She wrote her memoir, Never Broken, and recorded a pair of children’s albums. Picking Up the Pieces captures some of these moments on “Love Used to Be” and “Mercy,” but also gathers longtime unrecorded live favorites like “Carnivore” and “Boy Needs a Bike.” The album also includes “My Father’s Daughter,” a stunning autobiographical collaboration with Dolly Parton.
“I was trying to keep my mind quiet and honestly get back to something I feel like I’d lost touch with in my life. It was really an exercise in shutting out fear. I was giving myself permission to be exactly who and what I was.”