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24/192 music downloads make no sense

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Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#31

Post by muraiki »

bitwize wrote: post #23
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.

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 cra…

I mostly play acoustic instruments now, but I discovered what you were talking about when I used to make electronic music. I'd naively use some heavy compression for loudness, but as I added more parts things would get quite muddled. I'm no great audio engineer so maybe something else was the cause, but I'm pretty sure this was it.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#32

Post by klodolph »

rudolf0 wrote: post #25
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?

Not really, no.

Maybe if you really mangled your audio by encoding at extremely low bit rates.

But in general, no.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#33

Post by Johnny555 »

Wouldn't this question be answered with a large-scale double blind trial?

If more people prefer the sound at the higher bitrate and sampling rate, then that's the better format, even if there's no technical reason why that format is superior.

Much like how some people prefer the "warm" sound of tube amps, even if that means more distortion.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#34

Post by hammock »

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…

The normalization is song-by-song to my knowledge. It doesn't normalize the audio within the song itself. (Over)compression is a key part of the aesthetic of a lot of pop hits today, and while in the face of normalization you won't be able to make your song overall louder than the next, it won't necessarily stop you from creating a "wall of sound" waveform if that's the sound you're looking for.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#35

Post by icegreentea »

fla wrote: post #22

With nowdays bandwidths, why do we keep using destructive compression for songs?

Lossy vs non-lossy compression is orthogonal to the sampling rate and bit-depth (which is what this article is about). While the MP3 standard effectively means sampling more than 48kHz is useless, there's no reason you can't have a lossy comprssion scheme that attempts to capture higher frequencies.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#36

Post by splitdisk »

jchrisa wrote: post #28
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.

I would be very curious to listen to SACD on some good headphones in a quiet room. Not sure if I've ever even seen a SACD player aside from maybe in the Sony store 10 years ago. The trick would be to find something that would be mastered for the format.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#37

Post by upofadown »

Johnny555 wrote: post #33

Wouldn't this question be answered with a large-scale double blind trial? If more people prefer the sound at the higher bitrate and sampling rate, then that's the better format, even if there's no technical reason why that format is superior. Much like how some people prefer the "warm" sound of tube amps, even if that means more distortion.

From the article:

>Empirical evidence from listening tests backs up the assertion that 44.1kHz/16 bit provides highest-possible fidelity playback.

You can read the article if you want to find the actual references. No one is arguing that higher rates/bits produces any sort of distortion that anyone would prefer.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#38

Post by klodolph »

splitdisk wrote: post #19
klodolph wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can still hear around the 20k range, so let's not exclude a few listeners just because we wear hearing protection when it matters. In practice, 20k audio content means 44k or higher sample rates, due to the fact that actual filters have finite transition bands. There's an unfortunate history of engineers with poor hearing who inflict pain on others, such as the horizontal retrace on NTSC TVs which still annoys me w…

I'm very jealous of your healthy hearing range... I now wear hearing protection, but the damage has been done. When it comes to file storage, I will take a 44.1/48K 24 bit FLAC happily, since it usually comes out to the same size as a CD-Q WAV file anyways. I see no reason why everything shouldn't be in this format, but CD's have made a serious dent in formatting standards/habits.

24bit has been shown to be excessive in actual tests, and it doesn't really pass the "bullshit test". 24 bit allows you to switch between a whisper in a library and a jet engine or shotgun blast in a single recording—yes, it would instantly damage your hearing.

By comparison, 16 bit audio can "only" record a whisper in a library and a motorcycle or jackhammer.

Double blind tests show that 8 bits are not enough, but 14 bits are.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#39

Post by lmm »

hammock wrote: post #34
JonnieCache wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The normalization is song-by-song to my knowledge. It doesn't normalize the audio within the song itself. (Over)compression is a key part of the aesthetic of a lot of pop hits today, and while in the face of normalization you won't be able to make your song overall louder than the next, it won't necessarily stop you from creating a "wall of sound" waveform if that's the sound you're looking for.

Absolutely, and nor should it. But what it should mean is that if you make your song mostly quiet, your peaks will be louder than a wall of sound.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#40

Post by toast0 »

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…

Telephone audio is 8khz, so recording at a multiple of 8k helps with downsampling for IVR prompts or hold music. With dithering, it isn't terrible to downsampling from 44.1k to 8k, but it's nice to avoid it.
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