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My go to comparison track for sound quality for a new device, headphones, DAC, amp, codec etc, is "Speak To Me" from Dark Side Of The Moon. I don't hear a difference between various rips that are 16/128 or 24/192, but I have noticed a difference listening to the Blu-ray version of it (which is many-many gigabytes in size). It is a definitely interesting experience, but the way I can describe it is as an absolute abse…
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I think you have the wrong end of the stick there. Even if a track is heavily multiband compressed, it's still using the full range of levels, as audio will oscillate between -ve and +ve for each cycle, potentially using most of the 65,536 levels available at 16-bit (and the 16777216 levels at 24 bit). The 0.01 is not relevant.
No, I don't have it wrong. Compression means it's effectively using less of the range and the dynamics could be represented with fewer bits in an optimal encoding. All the levels may be used in track, but it's more biased towards the high end. To help you understand, imagine 1-bit audio. What would it sound like? For each frequency, you can only have a single volume, i.e. it's maximally compressed.
I'm not sure the 1-bit extreme helps with understanding this, particularly because the audio we'd be dealing with will be a mix of many frequencies; the waveform is an aggregate of the overall 'signal' at each frequency present in the mix; this is one of the reasons why multiband rather than single-band compression has become so popular (as it allows you to get the 'max' in each frequency band rather than one band dominating the overall result of the compression).
I think there's a difference to take into account when considering any given momentary sample and the overall effect - yes, compression does reduce the dynamic range of the music, but you would need some sort of variable bit depth which was linked to the instantaneous amount of compression being applied to get any kind of workable lower-bit-depth encoding scheme, which seems like a lot of complexity for no significant gain (to me?).
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…
Music streaming services have since become a very important music listening medium. Spotify, Google Music, Apple Music and others do normalization of these loudness levels. This neutralizes the loudness wars as it makes loudness wars treatment of music useless, at least when listened on streaming services [1]. Music mastered in the loudness war will still have problems with dynamic range but the perverse motivations causing the war are simply not as relevant for new music.
I agree the loudness war was a huge problem a few years ago, but changing trends in the ways music is being listened to is solving it. The way you present the loudness war problem is therefore somewhat out of touch.
[1]: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/ywgeek/why-spotif...
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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.
* With analogue equipment the latency between the input and output of the effect is often below 1 ms (unless the effect is supposed to have a delay).
* Standalone digital effect equipment that processes the samples one at a time can also have a latency below 1 ms. (48kHz ≈ 0.02 ms)
* If you use a computer for real-time effects, the samples are not transferred sample by sample from the audio interface, but in a block of many samples. The number of buffers and the size of them can usually be changed by the user. With a buffer of 1024 samples, the oldest sample is already about 21 ms old before the computer can process it. After the buffer is processed it has to be transferred to the audio interface, and that will add another 21 ms. So the minimum latency for any real-time effect in the computer is about 42 ms at 48 kHz if the size of the buffers is 1024 samples. Often it is much worse because the operating system adds more latency. If the equipment can handle a sample rate of 192 kHz, the same latency is about 10 ms. If the computer can handle smaller buffers, the latency can be lowered. With 256 samples per buffer the minimum latency will be about 11 ms at 48 kHz and 3 ms at 192 kHz.
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…
I've noticed the same thing with LP's. While LP's are technically inferior to red book CD's, they're often mastered better.
As ever this difference can be impossible to detect if the equipment and environment aren't of a sufficient fidelity/quality.
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.
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…
the 24/192 downloads or SACD releases are often the only way to hear the album with real dynamic range.
Also true? The completely absurd fact that sometimes a vinyl rip of an album will actually have the highest dynamic range, even though vinyl has a much smaller dynamic range than 16/44 audio. Bands often use "loudness wars" mastering for the digital release and then proper mastering for the vinyl release.
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.
The other poster is not saying otherwise, though. They're just saying that "hi-def" formats, while technically unnecessary for end-user listening, are often the only way to obtain a decently-mastered recording.
There's no technical reason for things to be that way. But that's how things are.
It's sort of like buying a new car. You want the more powerful engine? Well then you also have to buy the package with heated seats, the moonroof, and the fog lights. There's no technical reason for it, but that's the only way they'll sell it to you.
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…
The loudness war seems to have been a temporary problem, prevalent mostly because music was primarily listened as downloads of individual files or small collections of files. Music streaming services have since become a very important music listening medium. Spotify, Google Music, Apple Music and others do normalization of these loudness levels. This neutralizes the loudness wars as it makes loudness wars treatment o…