They are useful if you're resampling them or editing them, but I doubt that's something consumer music services are overly concerned with.
Or if you apply an equilizer, like lots of people do in consumer applications.
24/192 music downloads make no sense
41–50 of 242 posts
Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 1…
Citation? The article is talking about dithering, which you really don't want to do, not least because the end result will probably compress worse than the higher-bit-depth version. The fact that they suggest it at all implies, to my mind at least, that 16 bits isn't enough.
Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense
#43I 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 t…
Compressed formats are not really relevant to considerations about the bit depth itself.
Besides, mp3 [audio] compressions have difficulty in handling specific samples, or type of samples (eg. sharp attacks), and they may manifest artifacts independently of the bitrate; MP3, AFAIK, also has a ceiling of 320 kbps within the standard specification, which certainly doesn't help.
Secondly, I'm not sure if you process further the MP3s (when you refer to mixing), but if you do, you're definitely going to make noticeable, artifacts which weren't so in the unprocessed MP3 form.
Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Actually, yes.
mp3, for example, loves to save space by cutting away sounds just above the noise floor, and some less-noticeable frequencies.
Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense
#45Dithering is a horrible thing to be doing, and 44.1 is an awkward rate. So while I agree that 192khz is dumb, 24/48 is a better standard than CD.
Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense
#46With 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.
But the article makes a compelling case for why > 48kHz is completely pointless.
Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense
#47Why 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…
Here's a classic "OMG I can hear him moving around" recording that works with the cheapest of headphones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA Most of the audio experience quality comes out of the production phase, and artists can put as much or little effort into that as possible and consider several mediums of listening (headphones, TV, surround, concert, vinyl) and make tradeoffs for the medium's particular experience.
I don't know about double blind trials but people do tests on their own. It's further complicated though because the hardware you use could be optimized for certain types of music, e.g. have a read through http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/07/some-of-the-worlds-mo...
Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Apple doesn't sell 320kbps anything, but 256kbps AAC, which is probably better than 320kbps MP3.
Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense
#49To 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.
mp3 encoders have gotten better over time. As well as general improvements in fidelity, older encoders had bugs that would cause occasional terrible encoding for fragments of a sample.
Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense
#50So, no point in 24/192 because it makes no difference in playback... but having lossless downloads is important in part for enabling remix culture? There's a bit of a double-standard here. Maybe I can't hear 24/192 audio, but isn't it better input for sampling?