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

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

#251

Post by ycombinete »

lz400 wrote: post #214
em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "If you download mp3/spotify" You are misconstruing Monty's argument here. He is very much against mp3...in fact he says he could tell the difference between high bitrate mp3 and 16 bit 44k wav. The real point of the video is that 16 bit 44k wav is beyond sufficient...don't need to go beyond that to 24-bit 192kHz.

As far as I know, people consistently fail to tell the difference in blind A/B tests in listening between (any decent) FLAC and a well ripped mp3 from the same source. I know I can't. I can't link to proper double blind studies but that's the general consensus in the non-BS-audiophile community as far as I know.

My anecdote is that I've done a number of these tests (Foobar has a plugin that allows you to do them on yourself), and I can reliably tell the difference between FLAC and 128 MP3, but can't tell the difference on 256 MP3 and up.

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

#252

Post by cellularmitosis »

xiphmont wrote: post #227
em3rgent0rdr wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "If you download mp3/spotify" You are misconstruing Monty's argument here. He is very much against mp3...in fact he says he could tell the difference between high bitrate mp3 and 16 bit 44k wav. The real point of the video is that 16 bit 44k wav is beyond sufficient...don't need to go beyond that to 24-bit 192kHz.

> he says he could tell the difference between high bitrate mp3 and 16 bit 44k wav. In the early days, when all mp3 encoders were pretty bad, I could tell which encoder produced a given file. mp3 encoders today are vastly better. I've not been able to do that party trick in a long time.

I remember the Xing encoder was blazing lay fast, but sounded worse than LAME. This was around 1999, IRRC.

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

#253

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

kierenj wrote: post #250
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #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 dynam…

Did you check out the article? 16 bits can cover the range very well, more than you (or anyone) could ever distinguish

Sigh. Please see my other reply. It isn't a matter of bit rate (indeed, 16 bits could be more than enough). It is a matter of how engineers serve the targeted markets of each format.

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

#254

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

aw3c2 wrote: post #248
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has nothing to do with the 24/192 values themselves, but rather the treatment given to the recording during the mastering. Because 24/192 and SACD are "audiophile formats", the engineers who master the recordings expect them to be listened to in serious listening environments that are relatively noise-insulated so that very soft parts can be heard clearly, and there are no complaining neighbours so the loud parts…

You are proving the point. Treating the audio well, not giving in to the loudness, has only correlation with 24/192 releases (if you say so), there is no causation.

Sure, there is no causation of "higher bitrate necessarily makes for better sound", but the correlation of "higher bitrate format just happens to have better mastering" is often strong enough to make these the go-to formats. There are a large number of classic recordings that are difficult to obtain in the digital era without harsh compression being applied to them, so the 24/192 or SACD release is the most convenient way of hearing them with decent dynamic range.

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

#255

Post by cellularmitosis »

kuschku wrote: post #62
anyfoo wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

With video it’s not about bitrate, but Chroma Subsampling. Basically, mp4 and webm video only encodes the brightness channel Y at full resolution, and the color channels Pb Pr at half resolution. You can’t have mp4 or webm video without Chroma Subsampling, it’s defined in the codecs standard. Audio codecs do something very similar, cutting off a large percentage of the higher and lower frequencies. mp3 (and AAC) for…

Funny anecdote, I first became aware of this while watching Aliens. When the aliens cut the power and the set is bathed in the red of the emergency backup lights, the resolution of the video appears much worse.

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

#256

Post by shams93 »

lz400 wrote: post #140

There's a very straightforward practical reason why you might want to keep downloading 24/192. The people who put those together are on average "audiophile" snobs so the rips tend to be perfect, often from high quality sources like SACDs, hdtracks, etc. The source of the recording is usually the best master known for that record (special remastered editions, etc.). If you download mp3/spotify chances are the copy you…

The 192 is really for low latency not for anything you can actually hear. You can't hear the difference past 48khz. An audio interface that can do 192 gets you down to 5ms latency where you can finger drum without being thrown off. But it has nothing to do with audio quality. Like if you use guitar rig you will have the lowest possible latency for realtime computer generated guitar effects at 192.

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

#257

Post by copperx »

akvadrako wrote: post #240
hashmal wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does 24/192 help with dynamic range?

That's the 24-bit part, which provides more play room then 16-bit. Normally 16 is plenty, by consider an example track which is heavily compressed so only the top 1% of range is used: 16-bits = 2^16 * 0.01 = 655 discrete levels 24-bits = 2^24 * 0.01 = 168000 discrete levels

As Barbie would say: Audio engineering is hard! Let's play with the calculator.

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

#258

Post by Buge »

shams93 wrote: post #256
lz400 wrote: post #140

There's a very straightforward practical reason why you might want to keep downloading 24/192. The people who put those together are on average "audiophile" snobs so the rips tend to be perfect, often from high quality sources like SACDs, hdtracks, etc. The source of the recording is usually the best master known for that record (special remastered editions, etc.). If you download mp3/spotify chances are the copy you…

The 192 is really for low latency not for anything you can actually hear. You can't hear the difference past 48khz. An audio interface that can do 192 gets you down to 5ms latency where you can finger drum without being thrown off. But it has nothing to do with audio quality. Like if you use guitar rig you will have the lowest possible latency for realtime computer generated guitar effects at 192.

Where do you get the 5ms from? Why is 192 more likely to have lower latency? I would think the higher bandwidth required by 192 has the possibility to slow your computer down and cause more latency.

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

#260

Post by dom0 »

flavio81 wrote: post #65

Good points in the article, but it has some flaws. The problem whenever somebody writes about digital audio, is that it is very tempting to hold on to sampling theory (Nyquist limit, etc) and totally discard the problems of implementing an actual Analog-Digital and Digital-Analog chain that works perfectly at 44100Hz sample rate. I agree with the assesment that 16 bit depth is good enough; even 14 bit is good enough…

In practice, all audio converters are modulation converters of some sort, because it is simply too expensive to achieve the high AC linearity wanted at the required sampling frequencies with other kinds of converters. This already relaxes LPF requirements.

In practice, signal quality issues are usually layout and supply issues, not problems with the converter itself.

In practice, the speakers and ears are the worst parts with the largest non-linearities and a frequency response that looks like a nuke test area compared to the FR of the converter. Of course, in the case of speakers, we have concluded that we want them to have their own sound, because neutral speakers are not possible.

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