@voltronic yeah my first year or so of legit digital music was through Amazon music and now listening to them is... Painful to say the least.

Who you get your digital music from matters, so I wholeheartedly endorse your message.

@Hobyrim
Not all lossy-compressed music sounds bad, but the few things I bought from Amazon always sounded a bit harsh to me. There can often be big differences depending on what codecs are used for compression.

I now will only buy lossless for digital music, or <gasp> CDs.

@voltronic there can. But I had one album I adored from Max Graham, and it had a short silence on the end track.

Whatever Amazon used when they captured the album straight up truncated everything after that short pause.

Years later, it's still wrong. Luckily I found the album for cheap at a local shop and ripped it myself.

But lesson learned.

@Hobyrim
You have to be careful with the lossless music stores too, although I think people who are buying those files know to check them. Maybe 10 years or so ago, HDTracks got caught selling 24/96 and 24/192 files (at different price points) that were just upsamples of 16/44 originals. All it took was a quick scan with a spectrum analyzer to see there was no information beyond 22 kHz and they were caught.

@kay_dub
Mine too. I am one of those heathens who does not think Sgt. Pepper is their best album, though it has perhaps my favorite song (She's Leaving Home).

For me, it goes:

1. Abbey Road
2. White Album
3. Revolver
4. Sgt. Pepper
5. Rubber Soul

Then all the rest in no particular order.

@voltronic Think those are my 5 top as well, but I swap #2 & #5, and only because the White Album feels like a collection of songs from each artist, rather than "group" songs. All great songs, of course.

@kay_dub
That's a fair assessment. I always rank White Album near the top because it has so many songs that I love; some of their most creative work, IMO.