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Can I Burn High-Res Audio Downloads to DVD?

Al Griffin  |  Mar 27, 2014

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Q If I download 24-bit high-res music from an online source such as HDtracks.com, can I then burn it to a blank DVD and play it on the DVD-Audio player in my home theater system? It sucks that you can no longer buy DVD-Audio discs, but I was hoping to get DVD-Audio-like performance using this method. —Rick Cooper

A Not only can it be done, but online sources of high-res music such as Linn Records actually recommend that you burn your 24-bit downloads to DVD as a method to back up and archive them.

If you’re on a Mac, go ahead and download Burn . This free software lets you create DVD-Audio discs from high-res stereo tracks in FLAC, WAV, or AIFF format. Burn's interface is simple and intuitive, and it can also be used to author DVD-Video discs from video files in a range of formats.

If you’re on a PC, make a point of checking out DVD-Audio Solo . DVD-Audio Solo costs $44.95, but it gives you the option to author both 2-channel (up to 192/24 resolution) and 5.1-channel DVD-Audio discs. A different offering, HD-Audio Solo Ultra ($68.95), lets you add disc menus/still images, and upsample regular CD audio tracks to a high-res format. You can even use it to author Blu-ray music discs.

Another, admittedly less elegant, method you might want to consider is transferring your high-res downloads to USB flash drives. That way, you can easily access your tunes by plugging the drive into the USB slot on the front of a universal player like Oppo’s BDP-103 or -105, both of which support playback of high-res FLAC files.

COMMENTS
utopianemo's picture
Submitted by utopianemo on March 27, 2014 - 9:15am

Couldn't he also just save them to DVD's as the actual file? A lot of newer players recognize the files anyway.

Malcolm02's picture
Submitted by Malcolm02 on March 27, 2014 - 10:30pm

I used to burn my hi-res audio files to DVD-Audio. It worked fine apart from watermark issues on a couple of them. Then I ripped my entire music collection to my hard drive and now play them as described in the last paragraph, and have never looked back. Of course, you need to back up the drive, but that's no big deal nowadays.

rhirschey's picture
Submitted by rhirschey on April 1, 2014 - 12:41pm

Not only do these players support hi-res WAV files (with the Oppo supporting DSD as well), the do so in surround sound as well. I have confirmed that they are passing a hi-res signal to my Onkyo processor (a simple look at the incoming signal validates the sampling rate). For less than $100, you could buy a 3TB hard drive and hook it up to either of these, having the capacity of countless DVD's of hi-res music and movies for these players to access. Lastly, the WD TV will expose a hard drive that is hooked up to it on your network, allowing you to easily backup files from your main computer to the external drive over your network....just use a simple program like FreeFileSync to do this. If you're worried about sound quality, I would bet that the Oppo is "high-quality" in regards to how it pulls data off of the drive and passes the digital signal to your processor/receiver (i.e., limiting jitter, data loss, etc.).

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