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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)

#371

Post by stephen_g »

chaboud wrote: post #274

So, having come from an image-processing background to put in 15 years of experience at audio processing companies, I've seen the xiph arguments, or something like them, several times. Heck, I worked for Sony (where that precious 22KHz cliff was made) for close to ten years... in professional media... many of those years with Sony professional audio people. And the "44.1KHz is enough" or "48KHz" is enough" people are…

All that still doesn't explain why in properly controlled double blind trials, people still haven't been able to demonstrate the ability to distinguish between different sample rates above 44.1kHz though...

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

#372

Post by abpavel »

amygdyl wrote: post #127
jahnu wrote: 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…

Are you the kind of person who considers 24/384 not being good enough? Chasing 384KHz and beyond by buying $1000 USB cable to the DAC?

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

#373

Post by abpavel »

Applejinx wrote: post #297
kazinator wrote: post #147

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.

Lots of my plugin users are resorting to massive oversampling, even when it's not appropriate, simply because in their experience so many of the plugins they use are substantially better when oversampled. 192K is an extremely low rate for oversampling.

I wonder how you measure the quality difference for higher rates? 384K, 512K and beyond? I hear from audiophiles that there is a very distinct difference, but there is absolutely no basis for it in science.

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

#374

Post by lightedman »

I want as much resolution as possible, because when you do like I do and introduce pitch-shifting after the fact (re-tuning a Floyd Rose for every other song is not really conducive to a jam session) 24/96 just doesn't cut it at all, and you get bad artifacting further than a half step either way.

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

#375

Post by jackhack »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #330
DCKing wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The loudness war is a matter of degree. Sure, steps have been taken so that we maybe won't see another Death Magnetic where the compression has resulted in outright ear-bleeding distortion. But when most music today is listened to from portable devices in loud environments, it’s hard to believe that we are ever again going back to the level of dynamic range common before the loudness war. As I said, even some classic…

Add to this the 'Bass arms race' happening in the past 15 years.

It is especially noticeable if one listens to "modern" vs older CDs vs the radio. I suppose Producers now feel compelled to exercise subwoofers and thump the audience, or compensate for crappy earbuds in the target audience, or maybe that's just what people want because even radio commercials are complicit -- it's difficult to listen to someone talk with "thump/thump/thump" drumbeats in the background. Often, I simply turn it off.

In my car, I have the bass response dialed back by about 50%, and even dip the mid-range by about 15% to get what sounds to my ears like a flat response.

I have mild hearing loss from the 250 to 1k range, so my ears are already attenuating the signal -- I can only imagine how "bass heavy" it must sound to someone with normal hearing!

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

#376

Post by gmarx »

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

I'm an amateur at all this (and maybe the article stated this explicitly), I use Garageband. I find the main reason to do your recording and mastering in 24 bit is so you have room to change the level of each track without the sum of them clipping. When you are trying to set the levels of each track you have two constraints if you use 16 bit. The first is you need to keep all of them low enough that the overall recording doesn't clip but you also don;t want to over compensate and use only half the dynamic range available in 16 bit.

Doing this process in 24 bit gives you a large margin of error to play with. No real point to keeping that for the recording people are going to listen to

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

#377

Post by ksk »

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…

What are some examples of popular songs that had their loudness boosted?

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

#378

Post by StavrosK »

soneil wrote: post #293
sk5t wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of software generated this comment?

Hah, so cynical. No, this is just how audiophiles describe anything. Even their floorboards.

Could it be cargo cult science (language)? By making it sound like an academic paper, it passes for scientific.

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

#379

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

ksk wrote: post #377
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…

What are some examples of popular songs that had their loudness boosted?

Almost any reissue of material that has already appeared on CD in an earlier generation. Compare the post-millennial CD remasters of Slowdive's Souvlaki or the Cocteau Twins discography to the original CD issues of those albums in the early 1990s. Generally anytime an album is announced as "newly remastered" these days, the sole significant change is decreasing its dynamic range.

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

#380

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

codeulike wrote: post #363
Fifer82 wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have! I really have! My friend spends all his money on audio. I sadly just don't understand. You are correct. I was going to say that he pays infinite money for what to me is a 10% increase in enjoyment, but perhaps for you and him, your brain is better with sound, and you guys might get a 1000% improvement for your dollar. Although in any case, nothing justifies the pricetag dished out to audio enthusiasts.

I feel really sorry for audiophiles because they have to spend lots of money on expensive equipment to eliminate the perceived shortcomings that the rest of us are not troubled by during our enjoyment of music.

There is plenty of music that you wouldn't even get to enjoy if you didn't invest in some higher-end equipment and made some effort to improve your listening environment, because you wouldn't be able to hear it at all: the opening of Schnittke's Symphony No. 3 in the BIS recording, Nono’s Prometeo, Ligeti’s Cello Concerto as I mentioned above, most of Knaifel’s music issued on ECM or several of that label’s Pärt recordings, etc. That is music of extremely pianissimo dynamic. And no, you can’t just turn the volume up, because if you did that, the loud parts that come later would blow out your ears: you have to have a listening environment and responsive speakers that are capable of representing the whole dynamic range of the recording.
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