Hi-Res Downloads

96kHz/24-bit, FLAC*; A&M Records 00602557174496 (supplied by www.highresaudio.com)

He’s done the lutes, he’s done the concept album, and now Mr Sumner delivers perhaps the most down-the-line rock album of his solo career. It’s not quite as rootsy as one might expect, despite the road-trippy ‘Heading South On The Great North Road’: the album takes its title from the New York studio where it was recorded, after all. Yes, this outing by the Englishman in New York is occasionally overblown and stodgy, though that kind of goes with the ‘rediscovering one’s inner rocker’ genre, but when it’s good it harks back to the glory days of early Police tracks, which is no bad thing. The sound, while dense in places, has decent clarity, with of course the voice front and centre, but there’s nothing much here to challenge a high-res audio system, and frankly the ‘issues’ tackled here seem somewhat predictable, from refugees to the plight of the ageing rocker. AE

Sound Quality: 80%

Hi-Fi News Lab Report

Described as ‘energetic and noisy’ most of the tracks on this ‘96kHz’ download look like upsamples from 48kHz or 44.1kHz [trk 13] with varying degrees of sample clipping. Only the ‘acoustic’ tracks 7 and 10 may be true 96kHz. PM