I was never one to own an iPod, since I dislike the sound of mp3's so much! But NOW, I'm building a library of recorded music for my Samsung Note 4 cell phone that supports high-resolution music files... I have been buying albums at 24 bit/96 kHz, and many of them are from the original masters. I COULD buy them at a higher sampling frequency, but as you go up to, say 192 kHz, the prices also go way up. There may be a slight difference, but I don't know 'cause I'm so cheap... My fave library is HDTracks (no, I don't work for them LOL!).
I just listened to a few tunes on my studio headphones (Shure SRH840) from "Led Zeppelin II." Wow! If you think there's a lot of panning and other studio mischief going on with Hendrix recordings, listen to "Whole Lotta Love" on good cans. Not only is there tons of panning going on, but many reverb tricks, some stereo, some mono, and some delayed for maybe 2 bars and then the delay is turned off etc... Back then, I don't believe there was mixing board automation, so there must have been at least 5 pairs of hands literally doing all of this wild stuff! I've done that a long time ago on a 16 channel board, and even 3 pairs of hands is pretty claustrophobic . But I'm sure Zep had a much larger board to spread out all the manual knob-turning.
Anyway, if you haven't listened to "II" in awhile, check it out!
Ern
