101–110 of 445 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
tomc1985 said "fed through distortion/compression/warming effects processors" which is editing, not listening.
Yeah, editing
To be replaced soon by "4k video is very silly indeed" If you look at the angular resolution of the eye, unless you are sitting very close to the screen, you can't resolve 4k video.
This article makes the same mistake that is done frequently with video. So, let’s look at a similar issue with video. Your display is likely only 720p, or 1080p, but a 4K video on youtube will still look a lot better, although technically it should have no visible difference. But the reality is, we don’t get uncompressed video, or uncompressed audio. We have a choice between audio or video compressed with lossy codec…
The question is NOT
> Does 24/192 sound better than 16/44.1?
The answer is no.
The ACTUAL question is
> Does COMPRESSED 24/192 sound better than COMPRESSED 16/44.1?
The answer is yes (specifically in the case of mp3, aac, etc).
Stop confusing frequency range and sample rate. Its such a fundamental face palm. Nobody is saying listening to sound at a frequency above 22k is improving anything.
Off topic, but I've noticed in the gym, sometimes the music playing from the instructor's iPhone through one of those cheap Ion Block Rocker bluetooth speakers (big boxy one, looks like a guitar amp) has very very noticeable pitch sag in various parts of various songs. It's via bluetooth, and the source is Pandora. I even googled Pandora and pitch change, and found some forums with folks discussing bluetooth causing…
At my greatest aspiration, I'm no more than a casual music listener - however I am very conscious of pitch. On more than one occasion, I've noticed that a song I'm familiar with seems off pitch, as in lower or higher key than I think of it in my head - and I seem to notice that particularly around shitty speakers or bluetooth or some combination of the two. Glad to know I'm not crazy :) To your point, I would lean to…
This article makes the same mistake that is done frequently with video. So, let’s look at a similar issue with video. Your display is likely only 720p, or 1080p, but a 4K video on youtube will still look a lot better, although technically it should have no visible difference. But the reality is, we don’t get uncompressed video, or uncompressed audio. We have a choice between audio or video compressed with lossy codec…
The article was arguing about 24bit/192kHz digital audio, not about what codecs do or don't do with it. If you need 24bit/192kHz with both inaudible frequencies and inaudible dynamic steps to make 16bit/48kHz music sound better at the same bitrate, then the parameters you've given to your codec suck. Same for video. YouTube very likely allocates more bandwidth for 4k video than would be required for equivalent qualit…
That's the problem with the article. The audible improvement of 24/192 is noticeable AFTER compression not BEFORE. The article argues the latter point which is completely irrelevant.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I imagine it's because lossy codecs are tuned for human perceptual limitations, and when you process audio, it can "pull" areas of the sound that are otherwise hidden from your perception into perceptual ranges, analogous to how fiddling with the brightness/contrast of a highly compressed JPEG image can accentuate the artifacts.
But what about lossless 16/44.1KHz audio? It's not a "compressed" version of 24/192Khz. Chances are that your 192KHz music will be low pass filtered anyway, 192KHz is a trick that sound chipset vendors added so that integrators wouldn't have to make high quality analog filters for their ADCs. There's likely nothing above 22.05KHz except shaped noise, production artifacts, and very, very quiet ultrasound noises which…
The point of higher sample rates isn't to capture bat squeaks, but to relax the engineering constraints on pre-post filtering.
Nyquist is fine in theory, and if you've never actually tried to implement a clean filter you'll likely watch the xiph video and think "Well that makes sense."
If actually know something about practical DSP and the constraints and challenges of real filter design you're not going to be quite so easily impressed.
Likewise with higher bit depths. "Common sense" suggests that no one should be able to hear a noise signal at -90dB.
Common sense is dead wrong, because the effects of a single bit of dither are absolutely audible.
And if you can hear the effects of noise added at -90dB, you can certainly hear the effects of quantisation noise artefacts on reverb tails and long decaying notes at -30 to -40dB, added by recording at 16 bits instead of 24 bits.
Whether or not that level of detail is present in a typical pop or classical recording is a different issue. Realistically most music is heavily compressed and limited, so the answer is usually "no."
And not all sources have 24-bits of detail [1]. (Recordings made on the typical digital multitrack machines used in the 80s and 90s certainly don't.)
That doesn't mean that a clean unprocessed recording of music with a wide dynamic range made on no-compromise equipment won't show the difference clearly.
Speaking from experience, it certainly does.
[1] Technically no sources have 24-bits of detail. The best you'll get from a real world converter is around 22-bits.
I only use higher bitrates when creating music so when I mix or record I don't need to make the levels go almost into red to get a hot enough signal, I can do all kinds of changes like slowing down or up, distortion, EQ, compression without losing any perceived detail in the end. If I record on 16 / 44.1 then start manipulating the sound I start losing detail immediately.
But in the end more than 20 / 88.1 won't do much for you. 16 / 44.1 might be a bit less than ideal for music with a lot of dynamics but it's absolutely fine for most purposes.
While the extra quality is lost on listeners, from experience I've found that super-HQ source material can change your results (for the better) when fed through distortion/compression/warming effects processors