There are plenty of great online stores to download music. Amazon’s MP3 store and iTunes have zillions of choices.

We’re pretty fond of HDtracks as a newcomer to the scene that we’ve been following, thanks to its truly high-quality downloads. You can grab CD-quality sound in AIFF, FLAC and 320 Kbps MP3 downloads, and the Chesky brothers’ store even recently started pumping out 24-bit/96-kHz downloads for audiophiles to snatch up.

Now this cool store has teamed up with Gibson guitars—basically the label that’s to guitarists what Chesky or Reference Recordings is to audiophiles—to offer up a free CD-quality download of Gibson’s “Hot Tones in High Definition” recording, DRM-free as well.

“Hot Tones” is pretty hot indeed—ripping tracks from 15 top guitar shredders, including Johnny Winter, Eric Johnson, Neal Schon and Slash, who gives his take on a previously unreleased Rachmaninoff composition.

The download is free for the next 60 days, so hop on it. If HDtracks continues this freebie trend to go with its other fairly priced audiophile downloads, we’ll all be bringing external hard drives instead of CD wallets to the sweet demos at hi-fi and electronics shows.

Arlen Schweiger - Editor of Electronic House Magazine

Arlen writes about home technology installations and product news and reviews for electronichouse.com and Electronic House magazine.