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

> I can most certainly hear the compression when compared with CD digital audio.

with 256kbps AAC, really? yeah MP3 is old and even at 320kbps it throws away everything above 18kHz (which I can't hear personally, but some people can). However AAC is newer and better and blows MP3 out of the water (so do OGG and OPUS, btw). We got a lot better at psychoacoustics since MP3 started out. I strongly doubt you could hear it in a proper A/B test.

>TFA's author is not active in the field of advancing man's ability to recreate live music more convincingly, AFAIK; he writes codecs

As your other questions have been addressed by others, I simply would like to point out that this seems to be quite an arrogant stance to have.

The development of codecs has a lot to do with understanding of how the humans perceive sound, and how to effectively encode and reproduce sounds - which is useful even if you personally never listen to anything but analog recordings on analog systems.

However, we do live in a digital world, and one where codecs are a necessity. Codecs made recording, sharing, and distributing digital media at all possible - and now, they are making it possible to create better recordings by any metric you choose.

Consider this: bandwidth and space-saving that codecs give you allows you to record more data with the same equipment at the highest settings. That's why I don't have to think if I'll run out of memory I want to record 4-channel surround sound on my Zoom H2N (something that definitely goes towards a more faithful reproduction of being there than, say, bumping the frequency to 192kHz, which, incidentally, is the point of the article).

Unless you are there to record every live show, we'll have to rely on other people doing that - and guess what, they'll use codecs! How do I know that - that's because I do, they do, and the absolute majority of live show recordings that I've seen were not available in lossless formats. For that matter, good codecs contribute directly to the quality of the sound you'll hear.

Therefore, advancing the codecs does advance man's ability to recreate live music more convincingly.

So please, pause before dismissing other people's work.

>But he makes no mention of the interaural time difference in human auditory perception

He also doesn't mention how long it would take from Earth to Mars on a rocket, or the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. If you want to make a claim that this is somehow relevant to the question, you need to argue why, with sources - or simply ask the author, who might just answer.

>There is more to learn here, folks, and down-voting a question is an embarrassing failure of these forums. Why aren't posts in support of music piracy down-voted (read above)?

Not all questions are created equal. Your last question is an example of one that rightly deserves to be downvoted, as it contributes nothing to the discussion (of whether 192Khz really does anything for us), appeals to emotion, and derails the conversation off the topic. Please don't do that.

Studios work in 32bit-Float all the time...

Any serious club system can produce peaks waaaaay hotter than 120db, cleanly. Especially horn loaded systems like most anything on the high end these days. Horn loaded PA speakers can give you perfectly clear peaks at absurdly high amplitudes, cleanly. We don't hear peaks, we hear RMS volumes which are invariably at least 6 db down from the peak if not much more (classic rock routinely has peaks 30 db over the 'body' of the sound as expressed in RMS loudness). This easily raises the grungy one-bit noise floor level of 16 bit CD audio up into the plainly audible, and as for any lossy-encoded format, forget it: an order of magnitude worse.

CD quality is the very least you could want for a serious big club or theater system (much less auditorium). Between peaks and the requirements for deep bass, the peak in a digital audio file is (a)much farther above the body of music than you'd think, and (b) should never be reached, because that's clipping.

People routinely behave as if the theoretical maximum dynamic range of a Red Book CD is relevant to anything. It's incredibly easy to play back music loud enough that the noise floor will get obnoxious and relevant to listening, it's only 96 db down. Any small system in an enclosed live space can push louder than that. Cranking music over headphones will blow way past that and you won't even hear the peaks, but you'll be able to hear how bad the subtleties (or lack of same) on 16 bit red book CD are.

Electronic music, especially live, is totally relevant to high resolution audio. I more than suspect some of the big name acts (for instance, Deadmau5) are using converters to the mains running at not less than 24/96. Certain synthesizer mixes are very revealing of faults in the playback. If the live performance over a modern PA sounds absolutely huge and awesome, but not strained or grainy, then they're not using CD quality. The SPLs are more than enough to make these distinctions obvious.

Anyone can get these SPLs over headphones, trivially, and headphones that'll handle it cleanly are only a few hundred dollars.

That's not even an additional octave over 20K. It amazes me when people behave as if there's a magical hard limit that's really, really precise and applies to all humans.

I think you probably understand that people get locked into arguing for victory, and if you tell them you were tested with thus and so range (as a young person, which is plausible) they will simply call you a liar.

My own experience is this: when I was a kid, I got an ear wax problem, and had it removed (hasn't recurred). It was a horrible painful nightmare with nasty tweezers and water squirters, and I was just a little kid… but afterwards, sound (especially very high frequency sound) was a revelation.

Later, when I was a little older, the advent of digital audio (at first, in record albums) was a nightmare to me, because I couldn't understand how or why that stuff sounded SO BAD. And of course my early experience of CDs was pretty nightmarish: pod people music, with all emotion and humanity weirdly excised. That's what got me into audio: wanting to understand this, and then later, fix it.

I did actually succeed: I can produce and mix and process digital audio that young me would not be horrified by. But especially if I had to meet that higher bar, I won't be able to do it at less than say 22 bit/80K, well engineered. If I get to use all my current tricks I could do it at 20 bit/80K: I can cheat word length easier than I can compensate for a nasty brickwall filter.

24/96K is widely prevalent and enough, given good converters. I'm not convinced 192K is at all necessary, but the more people crusade against it, the more contrarian I get ;) I've got a Beauty Pill album mastered in 24/192K and it sounds freaking phenomenal. Mind you, I have professional equipment designed to handle that.