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24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)

xiph.org

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Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)

#181
post #18

I've said it before, this video demo is one of the very best I've ever seen. https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml So well prepared, so well presented, so little that could be removed without ruining it. I aspire to do such good demos but always fall so short.

Read the article, but didn't look at the video until seeing your comment. Thanks, that was indeed an excellent demo video.

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)

#182
post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there are flaws in the article as you claim. It already explicitly explains that oversampling at the ADC or DAC is an acceptable engineering solution: > Oversampling is simple and clever. You may recall from my A Digital Media Primer for Geeks that high sampling rates provide a great deal more space between the highest frequency audio we care about (20kHz) and the Nyquist frequency (half the sampling ra…

> I don't think there are flaws in the article as you claim. It already explicitly explains that oversampling at the ADC or DAC is an acceptable engineering solution Of course it is acceptable . Even 14 bit audio at 36KHz with a great DAC would be fairly nice, acceptable. What the article claims is that 192KHz is useless, of no benefit. And i contend that it is of benefit when you want more than just good or acceptab…

You've missed the point though - no human has demonstrated the ability to be able to distinguish the fidelity of audio above 44.1kHz sampling in a properly controlled comparison test (double blind). This empirical result is to be expected given the biology of the ear and the science of sampling theory, as the article explains.

It doesn't matter if you're a music lover or critical listener!

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not believe it. 24 bits is definitely needed for processing (better yet, use floating-point). Not 192 kHz; no friggin' way. Repeated processing through multiple blocks at a given sample rate does not produce cumulative discretization problems in the time domain; it's just not how the math works.

> better yet, use floating-point Both your inputs (ADC) and outputs (DAC) are fixed-point. Why would you want to use a floating point in between? Technically, 64-bit floating point format would be enough for precision. But that would inflate both bandwidth and CPU requirements for no value. 32-bit floating point ain’t enough. Many people in the industry already use 32-bit integers for these samples. > Not 192 kHz; no…

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Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)

#184
post #69

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.

That's not true at all. I can visually discern 4K from 1080p on my desktop monitors (4K 27 inch) and even on my 15 inch Retina MacBook if I try. On a large TV it's generally fairly easy too.

Sure, if you're looking at a little 40" TV five meters away, not so much, but for many screens in common use 4K is useful (but getting close to the point of diminishing returns, sure). Whereas as this article says, higher than 48kHz audio should be literally impossible to discern for any human in any setup.

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not believe it. 24 bits is definitely needed for processing (better yet, use floating-point). Not 192 kHz; no friggin' way. Repeated processing through multiple blocks at a given sample rate does not produce cumulative discretization problems in the time domain; it's just not how the math works.

> better yet, use floating-point Both your inputs (ADC) and outputs (DAC) are fixed-point. Why would you want to use a floating point in between? Technically, 64-bit floating point format would be enough for precision. But that would inflate both bandwidth and CPU requirements for no value. 32-bit floating point ain’t enough. Many people in the industry already use 32-bit integers for these samples. > Not 192 kHz; no…

> Therefore, extra temporal resolution helps.

But it's not resolution, right? It's extra frequencies outside the audible range. Is there any natural process that would make those affect the audible components, if I were listening to the music live instead of a recording?

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To truly support downstream remixing, musicians would need to distribute the original, separate tracks. Occasionally an independent musician will do this, but it's not at all common AFAIK.

For software, you have a source code, you compile it with a standard-complying compiler, and you’ll more or less reproduce the result. Music is different. If you have the original multi-track composition, you can’t reproduce the result unless you also have the original DAW software (of the specific version), and all the original VST plugins (again, of the specific version each). All that software is non-free, and typ…

You could bounce each track as an individual audio file

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)

#187
post #18

I've said it before, this video demo is one of the very best I've ever seen. https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml So well prepared, so well presented, so little that could be removed without ruining it. I aspire to do such good demos but always fall so short.

I felt that the presenter is a very rare example of a engineer who felt that his expression and purpose was attractive to his imagined audience. Without diversion via the questions embedded in the profession and the perception and self perception of the male geek working and academic world, I so rarely see a presenter reacting to a sense of apparent human warmth in the room, and beyond the lens, which even with the m…

[deleted]

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no reason the DAC or ADC can't internally do the resampling itself. In fact, most take it to the extreme - they resample to several MHz, but at 1 bit per sample, with noise shaped dithering as explained in the video linked elsewhere. They then have a very simple analog low pass filter - the noise is shaped far into the stop band of the filter. That is no reason to store or even process your music at higher r…

> There is no reason the DAC or ADC can't internally do the resampling itself. You are describing alternative (b) i mentioned above: digital filtering plus oversampling. This also isn't without side effects. Oversampling a 44KHz signal is not the same as having a 192Khz material to start with. Very different.

Yes, and the only difference is the lack of unwanted ultrasonic signals.

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To truly support downstream remixing, musicians would need to distribute the original, separate tracks. Occasionally an independent musician will do this, but it's not at all common AFAIK.

For software, you have a source code, you compile it with a standard-complying compiler, and you’ll more or less reproduce the result. Music is different. If you have the original multi-track composition, you can’t reproduce the result unless you also have the original DAW software (of the specific version), and all the original VST plugins (again, of the specific version each). All that software is non-free, and typ…

All true. One independent musician that I like, Kevin Reeves, made the tracks from his first album available for free download for a while. But he published them as WAV files. So, of course, one could only create one's own mixes, not easily reproduce his. But if he had just posted the files saved by his DAW (or his mix engineer's DAW), that would have been useless to just about everyone. Aside: Though the album was completed in mid-2006, it was recorded with DAW software that was obsolete even then, specifically an old version of Pro Tools for Mac OS 9, because both Kevin and his mix engineer (for that album) are blind, and Pro Tools for OS X was inaccessible to blind users at the time.

BTW, I'm merely a dilettante when it comes to recording and especially mixing.

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)

#190
Not entirely silly. Yes, the purported benefits of this high-fidelity audio are imaginary or even include undesirable traits. However, when most "remasters" of pop music today involve the dynamics being boosted to "loudness wars" standards for a target audience of people listening to the music through earbuds in the street, the 24/192 downloads or SACD releases are often the only way to hear the album with real dynamic range.

I’m not sure how big that market is these days, though. I recently decided to move from a block in the city to a house in the surrounding countryside purely to get a quieter listening environment and let me really enjoy the high-dynamic-range recordings I have – I listen to a lot of classical music, especially the avant-garde with its even greater range, e.g. the Ligeti cello concerto starting from pppppp. Yet even among my friends who are really obsessed with such music, seeking a better listening environment seemed an extreme measure to take.

So, people who a generation ago would have invested in higher-end equipment (not audiophile snake oil, just better speakers) and who would have sought silence are now giving in to listening to music on their phones or cheap computer speakers. It’s a big shift.

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