I have purchased a few titles from HDTracks in FLAC even though I have the CD as they are remastered at 24/96 or higher. The big problem is that a lot I would buy are "Not available for download in your country" which is a real disappointment.
I did not know the downloads were country specific, thank you for bringing that up.
The other and maybe more sinister problem with certain download sits, is we really dont know where the tracks are sourced. Are they really high rez taken from the original high def source or are they merely up converted 16/44.1 tracks. I wrestle with this a lot when picking music and in my opinion, more often than not, the advertisements are true in that the tracks sound better. In some cases, they just sound louder and frankly the original release sounds better. A good example would be the Beatles catalog released some time ago on a thunb drive that came in a nice green apple. These tracks, imo, have been ruined in that as I mentioned, they are now louder and much less musical, Another example would be the Bat out of hell album by Meatloaf, the down load is thin sounding and seems to have no dynamics.
The other side of the coin are albums like Crime of The Century by Supertramp and Tea For The Tillerman, Cat Stevens, Norah Jones, Come Away With Me or even Eric Clapton, Slowhand. These are all tremendous HIgh Rez Downloads and should be sampled by all of us interested in what high Rez sounds like.