24/192 music downloads make no sense • Hacker News Board

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#191

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Nov 07, 2015, 2:00 AM UTC

nullc wrote: post #181

lmm wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Paper seems to be paywalled. I can't imagine any possible purpose for dithering before encoding that wouldn't be better served by dithering on playback.

At 16 bits dithering is probably pointless for listening purposes. What dithering does is it decorrelates the quantization noise with the signal. Absent it, quantization generates harmonic spurs. In theory, on a very clean and noiseless signal these harmonic spurs might be more audible than you'd expect from the overall quantization level. In practice, 16 bits is enough precision that these harmonics are inaudible ev…

[deleted]

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#192

Post by w4 » Sat, Nov 07, 2015, 2:05 AM UTC

chillingeffect wrote: post #179

beat wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've played acoustic and electric instruments for over 30 years, and recorded numerous albums. Compression is the best tool we have for accurately reproducing the musicality and emotion of a musical performance. Without compression, most recordings would be unlistenable. Don't confuse the foolishness of the loudness wars for "compression is bad". That's like saying the internet is bad because there's porn on it.

I respect your opinion, but it's only your opinion, not a global truth. Compression is a style. There is far more to musicality and emotion than compression. The problem compression solves is that the environments where industrialized cultures now listen in are not dedicated listening areas, but alternately loud and quiet places, so compression makes all parts of the music almost equally loud so there are no drop out…

> bands and styles with wide dynamic range like the Pixies, Nirvana and dubstep

One of these things is not like the others.

I can't tell if you're trolling here, or if you legitimately don't know much about audio engineering, because Dubstep (and electronic music in general) is probably the most aggressively compressed and limited genre of music out there.

If you actually do feel that Dubstep has a lot of dynamics, then you're misattributing the lack of dynamic range in a lot of modern music to audio engineering. What you're really bothered by is the songwriting and musicianship, not the engineering or compression.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#193

Post by silentplummet » Sat, Nov 07, 2015, 2:06 AM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #134

ska wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is pretty clear about this too - higher bitdepths and sampling rates can be quite useful in mixing and recording situations. They're pointless for playback.

No they're not. And no matter how many times this gets linked to on the Internet, it's still wrong. The basic problem: the quieter a sound or detail gets, the fewer bits of resolution are used to represent it. In 16-bit recording, there simply aren't enough bits to represent very low level details without distorting them with a subtle but audible crunchy digital halo of quantisation noise. In a 24-bit recording, ther…

Are you an expert?

In a 16-bit master, a noise shaping function is applied during down-conversion, by which quantization noise will be re-distributed so that most of the noise energy goes to the high frequencies (>15k) where it is completely inaudible.

For a good example of such a recording, see Ahn-Plugged (Ahn Trio, 2000, Sony BMG Masterworks). Fire up a good spectrum analyzer. You'll find the noise floor is well below <110 dB throughout most of the spectrum, even though it's 'just' a 16 bit CD.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#194

Post by ZoFreX » Sat, Nov 07, 2015, 2:23 AM UTC

shmageggy wrote: post #113

tammer wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a common misconception that vinyl necessarily imparts all possible audio benefits to whatever is pressed into it. Now, I'm not Gaga's recording engineer, and for all I know you're absolutely right and her & her team remastered each track without compression for the vinyl pressing. Considering how rare such a process is in industry recording, however, I doubt it. I assume that really the difference you're hearing…

Mastering for vinyl is very common in the industry. I don't have time to dig up a reference right now, but the medium has different constraints than digital so is usually mastered separately, especially for big budget stuff. The differing constraints are mainly that while CD has a hard amplitude limit (hence brickwall limiting), the constraint on vinyl is not hard in the same way -- it mostly has to do with amplitude…

I agree that mastering for vinyl happens, but you're not right about the dynamic range. CDs were popular initially because they have a wider dynamic range, the overly compressed / "loudness wars" tracks are nowhere near the limits of the medium. It is true that vinyl these days often has wider dynamic range - because the market for how songs sound is different for people buying vinyl, so they're mastered with wider range.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#195

Post by yzhou » Sat, Nov 07, 2015, 2:31 AM UTC

nullc wrote: post #177

yzhou wrote: post #58

There's a big difference in impulse response with different sample rates, any one can see it on a oscilloscope, I bet some one can hear the difference. Those who don't have a oscilloscope can see the picture here: http://i.imgur.com/wY0wzcW.png

What you are showing is _precisely_ the effect of low-passing, nothing more, nothing less. See the digital media primer 2 for more information on that: https://wiki.xiph.org/Videos/Digital_Show_and_Tell If humans were able to hear audio above 22kHz (or what not) in any meaningful way, we'd expect to be be able to demonstrate that effect in carefully controlled studied and then that lack of low-passing may matter; but…

The low-passing with a brick wall filter on 44.1KHz audio can be a bad thing sometimes, for example, pre-echo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pre-echo You won't hear the pre-echo on a 2.8MHz DSD audio.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#196

Post by TillE » Sat, Nov 07, 2015, 2:32 AM UTC

darkmighty wrote: post #188

rplst8 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The recording equipment won't necessarily pick it up. If the microphones are place very close the instruments relative to the other instruments creating the interaction.

If no recording equipment would pick it up, no human would pick it up either. Quoting xiphmont > Once you're driving air so hard it becomes nonlinear, thus introducing intermodulation distortion in the air, that distortion produces actual audible-range distortion products. And because the distortion you're hearing is in the audible range, a recording will sample and reproduce it accurately. > You're hearing the audib…

> If no recording equipment would pick it up, no human would pick it up either.

Have you been to a concert? There's no recording/playback technology that can reproduce anything close to the sound of a full orchestra. It's all lossy.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#197

Post by StavrosK » Sat, Nov 07, 2015, 2:39 AM UTC

Everything else is fine and good in the article, but I can see the infrared in the Apple remote (and all the other IR remotes I've tried). It's faint, but plainly visible. Am I the only one?

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#198

Post by glitch » Sat, Nov 07, 2015, 2:50 AM UTC

StavrosK wrote: post #197

Everything else is fine and good in the article, but I can see the infrared in the Apple remote (and all the other IR remotes I've tried). It's faint, but plainly visible. Am I the only one?

Went to a dark room with an Apple Remote; let my eyes adjust for a little while. Pressed it many times; I couldn't see the infrared coming from the LED with my naked eye. (But the camera on my iPhone imaged the infrared from the remote's LED.) I envy your biological wavelength detection.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#199

Post by darkmighty » Sat, Nov 07, 2015, 2:50 AM UTC

TillE wrote: post #196

darkmighty wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If no recording equipment would pick it up, no human would pick it up either. Quoting xiphmont > Once you're driving air so hard it becomes nonlinear, thus introducing intermodulation distortion in the air, that distortion produces actual audible-range distortion products. And because the distortion you're hearing is in the audible range, a recording will sample and reproduce it accurately. > You're hearing the audib…

> If no recording equipment would pick it up, no human would pick it up either. Have you been to a concert? There's no recording/playback technology that can reproduce anything close to the sound of a full orchestra. It's all lossy.

That's an entirely different discussion having nothing to do with intermodulation products.

Have you read the article/quantization discussion on what is meant by lossy? If your recording equipment is good and your reproduction equipment is good, 16/44 is enough to reproduce the concert sound perfectly (as far as human hearing goes). What you do not experience is everything else but the sound -- the vibration of the super loud bass on your skin, the energy of the public, the beauty of the venue.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#200

Post by rphlx » Sat, Nov 07, 2015, 2:54 AM UTC

24/192 lossless is a digital Veblen good; some people will pay more for it (and/or the HW to play it & store it), and almost all of them will enjoy it more, if only because it costs more. Whether it actually sounds better is somewhat tangential.