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24/192 music downloads make no sense

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Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#21

Post by sliverstorm »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #17
sliverstorm wrote: post #15

To what can I attribute the consistently horrible quality of 64kHz streams ten or fifteen years ago? Would that fall under the "bad encoder" bucket? Edit: christ, I mixed up bitrates (e.g. 192kbps) with sampling frequency (e.g. 192kHz) again. I was referring to 64kbps streams.

64 kHz isn't a standard sample rate -- you're probably thinking of the bit rate of an MP3 or AAC file. A 64-kbit MP3 does sound pretty awful.

Yup. Further confusing me was the fact that (if memory serves) Apple did offer MP3's at 192kbps for a while, before upping to 320kbps.

Edit: apparently my memory is worse than I thought.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#23

Post by bitwize »

muraiki wrote: post #12
hatsunearu wrote: post #10

The single worst thing that harms audio quality is excessive compression. It's ruining everything, I'd say. Heck, I'm sure everyone who knows their worth would agree that compression harms audio quality. Recommended reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war edit: compression as in dynamic range compression, not data compression like mp3 in audio

Reading "compression" as both a programmer and audio-minded person made that first sentence difficult to parse at first. :) But yeah, it's obvious when I have my car stereo nearly on max to listen to classical or jazz, and then if I turn the radio and get a pop music station my ears are about to explode.

It's not just the acoustic properties of dynamic-compressed music. The compression forces music to be more simplistic, because there's less "room" for complexity. Michael Jackson's "Thriller" is a standard pop hit, engineered for chart performance and not artistic virtuosity, but it is still a rich, deep, satisfying piece of music to listen to in part because there's a whole lot of stuff going on. If you tried to cram that many instrument parts into a modern Katy Perry tune, it would clip like crazy and become unlistenable hash.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#24

Post by [deleted] »

hatsunearu wrote: post #10

The single worst thing that harms audio quality is excessive compression. It's ruining everything, I'd say. Heck, I'm sure everyone who knows their worth would agree that compression harms audio quality. Recommended reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war edit: compression as in dynamic range compression, not data compression like mp3 in audio

[deleted]

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#25

Post by rudolf0 »

hatsunearu wrote: post #10

The single worst thing that harms audio quality is excessive compression. It's ruining everything, I'd say. Heck, I'm sure everyone who knows their worth would agree that compression harms audio quality. Recommended reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war edit: compression as in dynamic range compression, not data compression like mp3 in audio

Excessive data compression will also lower dynamic range, though, no?

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#26

Post by earlz »

I can't hear a difference between 96khz/44khz in it's raw form. However, I can tell the difference from effects in audio mixing. The extra detail can really make a difference in how well an audio effect VST works.

I have a 96khz/24bit interface that I use and ATH-M30X headphones, and I can tell a difference between at least some 24bit FLAC files and 16bit highest-quality-possible MP3s. I was mixing my own music and the difference was quite obvious to me. The notable thing was that drum cymbals seemed to have a bit less sizzle and such.

Now that being said, if I hadn't heard the song a million times in it's lossless form from trying to mix it, I probably wouldn't have noticed, and even then it didn't actually affect my "experience".

I'm one of those guys that downloads vinyl rips as well, but I do that mostly just to experience the alternative mastering, not that I think it's higher quality or anything. (though I have heard a terrible loudness-war CD master that sounded great on vinyl with a different master)

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#27

Post by muraiki »

JonnieCache wrote: post #16
muraiki wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading "compression" as both a programmer and audio-minded person made that first sentence difficult to parse at first. :) But yeah, it's obvious when I have my car stereo nearly on max to listen to classical or jazz, and then if I turn the radio and get a pop music station my ears are about to explode.

Don't worry, the loudness war is basically over. itunes and youtube normalize everything to -15dbRMS and -13dbRMS respectively. Spotify uses the ReplayGain algorithm. Broadcasters worldwide now use the EBU R128 standard, which is a more effective form of loudness normalization, hopefully to be adopted by online services too at some point. All that's required is for personal media players to widely implement loudness…

Yeah, I should have read the wikipedia article in full before commenting. I'm glad the war is over!

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#28

Post by jchrisa »

splitdisk wrote: post #8

From my experience, what matters more than sample rate is 24 bit vs. 16 bit sampling in the recording/production process. Using heavy compression and EQ can mean that very quiet sounds can become louder, in this case 24 bit recording is ideal. Sample rate wise, anything above 40khz is fine for most ears (I've probably lost a few khz in the upper range anyways) Another note is that most converters operate at a multipl…

Have you tried listening to SACD? The high sample rate might not give you more reproduction of audible frequencies, but the difference in arrival times it can encode makes well recorded stereo stuff more interesting to listen to, in my limited experience.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#29

Post by hammock »

hatsunearu wrote: post #10

The single worst thing that harms audio quality is excessive compression. It's ruining everything, I'd say. Heck, I'm sure everyone who knows their worth would agree that compression harms audio quality. Recommended reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war edit: compression as in dynamic range compression, not data compression like mp3 in audio

Dynamic range compression is an important part of the aesthetic of pop music today, like it or not. Pop hits don't sound the same without it. For this reason (unaffected by normalization on itunes/youtube) it will be slow to go away.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#30

Post by lawnchair_larry »

andy_ppp wrote: post #5

Why do high quality DACs clearly sound better then? And they sound better with better files. Maybe it really is all in my head but I mean listening to a £20000 hifi the other day (vinyl) really just shocked me. I was listening to Marvin Gaye on my friends system and I could hear that there were several different backing singers all moving and at different distances from the microphone. Are there any double blind tria…

Vinyl actually has far less fidelity. You also physically change the recording every time you play it back. Even on the same equipment, no two plays of a vinyl LP sound exactly the same, unlike digital.

This fact alone should cause you to question your subjective experience. You have no idea what part of that system was contributing to what you found pleasant. Someone who knew what they were doing could probably build a $2000 system that would blow you away just the same.

And if you were playing vinyl, there wasn't even a DAC present in the signal chain :)

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