"Gentlemen, meet your ears"
Shame about the sexism
24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)
331–340 of 445 posts
Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Assuming equivalent quality of CD playback equipment and LP playback equipment, LPs provide superior sound quality. LPs are analog, so what reaches your ears is undiluted sound. CDs are digital, so there are gaps in the sound, and there's the analog audio conversion that must happen to record to a digital/CD format, and digital audio conversion back to analog that must happen to hear the sound from a speaker. Both co…
Try watching this video (hope I found the right one):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM
I think you're right that recording equipment has a long way to go, though; regardless of format I think people can relatively easily distinguish real acoustical instruments from recordings.
Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm not sure how it's not even more "silly" then. Investing in additional infrastructure, equipment, and effort, when all you need to do is turn down the compressor ratio in the mix... Sounds silly to me.
> all you need to do is turn down the compressor ratio in the mix
The problem here is that the "you" in this sentence is not "me", or even an entity I can really influence, much less control.
It's not really even the audio engineer whose boss is telling him to turn up the volume so high that only the top few bits of the 16-bit recording are in use. The boss is saying this so that the song can be heard when the user turns the volume down because of the obnoxiously noisy commercials on the radio. Those commercials have found that they're more effective when they turn the volume way, way up. And they don't give a whit about the quality of their audio as long as they can sell more cars or tickets or whatever, much less the quality of the songs that play after them, much much less the quality of the songs that someone downloads to listen to offline in a nice listening environment without commercials.
The solution isn't just "turn down your compressor ratio", there's a big, hairy Nash equilibrium/politics problem that can be bypassed by offering 24/192 as a secondary product. If you want to remaster it to 16/48 after downloading, you're welcome to do so.
Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Assuming equivalent quality of CD playback equipment and LP playback equipment, LPs provide superior sound quality. LPs are analog, so what reaches your ears is undiluted sound. CDs are digital, so there are gaps in the sound, and there's the analog audio conversion that must happen to record to a digital/CD format, and digital audio conversion back to analog that must happen to hear the sound from a speaker. Both co…
>digital, so there are gaps in the sound
What kind of gaps? There are no gaps. Sampled signals perfectly represent the original wave up to half the sampling frequency. Analog systems are inevitably limited in their frequency response as well, so, given the same bandwidth, there would be no difference at all.
In the real world, imperfect A/D and D/A conversions are typically still far less destructive than all the mechanical and electromagnetic sources of noise that affect analog systems. You can't consider one but not the other.
Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your reply is not the whole picture. Compression reduces the effective number of bits of resolution.
If you had an RGB (24 bits) image that is mostly very dark, would you say that somehow because the image doesn't use the full range of possible values, the image quality suffered? Would you say that changing the format/bit-depth would actually lead to a perceived increase in quality when looking at the image?
I don't understand why you said I was wrong in the other comment, but you give here an appropriate analogy which makes the effect obvious.
Because we only have 8 bits per channel, we all can see banding in (dynamically) compressed images. That's what increasing the depth improves.
Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
There's no such thing as lossless 16/44.1 because it's practically impossible to make an artefact-free antialiasing/reconstruction filter pair clocked at 44.1k. 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 thi…
> you'll likely watch the xiph video and think "Well that makes sense."
What video? This thread is about an article.
> The point of higher sample rates isn't to capture bat squeaks, but to relax the engineering constraints on pre-post filtering.
I just said that, I think.
Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)
#337Not 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…
> 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.
No. It's still entirely silly. The reason? The dynamics are unrecoverable once squashed by a limiter or compressor during the remastering process. The fidelity of the delivery medium is moot after that happens.
Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)
#338There's something satisfying about having really fat audio files on the hard drive.
Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)
#339Earlier 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…
this is roughly what the "Mastered for iTunes" badge means on iTunes downloads the mastering engineer has to be approved and there are some minimum dynamic range standards also 24 bit (but not 192khz) master files have to be supplied reportedly some of the streaming services (Spotify, YouTube) are now applying some 'loudness normalisation' which will bring some of the bad loud masters into line (it won't restore thei…
Mastering for "high fidelity" 24-bit audio on iTunes is an oxymoron. The compression algorithms used for AAC and MP3 are going to the worsen the sound quality in a manner that renders the extended dynamic range of 24-bit audio is useless.
Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)
#340I'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…
If you're striving for clarity in this comment, I suggest rewriting it from scratch :)