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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)

#431

Post by Mediterraneo10 »

S_A_P wrote: post #354
rplst8 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 dyn…

This. Once the "master" is treated with the maximizing limiters that are used in the loudness war the files are just rendered into their separate file formats. If the SA cd promised that they reloaded the source tape/protools/whatever DAW was used and remixed/ remastered the songs to actually have dynamic range then I would be interested. As far as I am aware this isn't happening, and is implausible for any record of…

Loudness-wars compression is a product of the digital recording era, and quite a few years into it, too. A lot of music that people still want to listen to today predates all that.

Many SACD reissues do go back to the source tape. This is a frequent cause of complaint with SACD reissues of classic jazz recordings from the 1960s: sometimes you get better sound in terms of dynamic range than any previous CD issue of that recording, but in the meantime the source tape may have deteriorated in parts.

Even with recordings from the “loudness wars”, there is sometimes room for dynamic range improvement when remastering. A good example is Rush’s album Vapor Trails. This was an infamously botched recording upon its original release, on a scale with Death Magnetic. Because loudness-wars treatment plagued the original tracks before mixing, the damage could never entirely be repaired. However, the additional process of compression applied to the source during transfer to CD could be reversed, so the album was eventually reissued as Vapor Trails Remixed, and while still flawed, that reissue has a lot more room to breathe than the original CD release.

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

#432

Post by quakenul »

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…

It is entirely silly. The believe that there is causation between a high fidelity, high dynamic range release and 24/192 is exactly the issue.

Yes, those high dynamic range releases usually get published in 24/192. No, the fact that they get published in 24/192 does not, as far as human hearing goes, add anything to the dynamic range or otherwise the fidelity of the recording.

Since the correlation is so strong, it is of course entirely understandable that people assume causation exists.

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

#433

Post by Thoreandan »

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…

I agree, Monty is a good presenter and a good speaker. You can tell he loves his subject matter, and he's eloquent and understandable in sharing it.

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

#434

Post by intractable »

wiredearp wrote: post #308
72deluxe wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this? I only have 16 bit 44.1kHz "normal" CDs and I notice some terrible mastering jobs, eg. RHCP Stadium Arcadium loses the snare for the first track and is like listening to minutes of distortion yet apparently the vinyl was really well mastered. Is there a technical reason why the mastering is so different for the two mediums, CD versus vinyl?

When you boost the loudness too much (for your specific turntable to handle), the needle will simply jump out of the groove, not kidding.

This is true, to a certain extent. But it doesn't mean that masters for vinyl always have more dynamics left intact.

More often than not these days, the same compressed master is used for the vinyl. To combat the groove-jumping problem, the overall level is simply dropped.

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

#435

Post by quakenul »

jackhack wrote: post #375
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

The only thing that any good producer feels compelled to, is to create the best possible record.

There is nothing inherently good or bad in music production, no timeless rules as to how much treble or bass, compression, distortion, reverb or anything else you need. It has all been done to the extreme and what is deemed good is subject to constant change.

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

#436

Post by z3t4 »

Fifer82 wrote: post #287
z3t4 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly most people have never experienced good sound. When you hear it though. But taste can be very different.

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.

There are no short cuts to good sound, you can buy the most expensive equipment but still have bad sound due to the acoustics of the room. It's also somewhat random, like placement and materials dampening different frequencies. So I guess it becomes a sort of addiction.

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

#437

Post by z3t4 »

graphitezepp wrote: post #343
mixedCase wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An 100-150 dollar headset of the right type is hardly "infinite money" and I would call it paradigm-changing compared to what most people seem to be using, at least over here. It's only at higher tiers that the difference might really be imperceptible to many ears.

Yeah the full on audiophile stuff is mostly nonsense as far as I can tell, but my god I do not understand how so very many people put up with those crappy apple earbuds as there primary sound playback. The difference with a proper set of headphones is massive.

Anything is better then the cheap ones you get for free. I guess people want to have "the original" lol. But then when you get better headphones you can hear the background buzz from low end devices ...

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

#438

Post by tinix »

I challenge y'all to take two copies of the same professionally mastered track, 16 vs 24 bit... and phase invert one, and put them on top of each other. What you can then hear is basically like an auditory diff.

Do you not hear anything? Yeah... all that sound is what amounts to lost fidelity when you down-sample. You can't just argue on bit-rates alone... It's about having head room in the mix and room for more fidelity. Sure, if you mix shit badly, you can't hear the difference, but that's missing the point entirely.

It's not nearly as bad as the time someone tried to tell me that Opus was an adequate audio file format for music, but still... frustrating.

I know I don't have super-human hearing, and I can easily hear the difference. Just because everyone can't hear the difference, or can't tell that they can hear the difference, doesn't negate the fidelity loss of lower bitrates.

Further, given a large enough speaker stack, it's not about what you can hear any more, it's about what you can feel.

And never-mind the benefits of a 24bit DAW pipeline... Hello, low latency?

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

#439

Post by em3rgent0rdr »

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.

thank you for clarifying! It seems I slightly misrepresented your views...for that I'm sorry...I was going on memory of what I remember you saying.

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

#440

Post by JohnBooty »

ladzoppelin wrote: post #392
JohnBooty wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, absolutely. 16 bit samples give 100db+ of perceived dynamic range, more than would ever be needed. 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 buy…

But there is a technical reason for them as the tools used to master/make music work better at the higher formats. Its not "superstition" its digital audio.

Of course. That's why I specifically said "end-user listening."

It's also what this entire discussion's about.

Of course formats above 44.1/16 are useful for professional work; nobody's ever said otherwise. Just like graphics professionals work with high-res images and lossless formats even if the end product is a .jpg on a web page.

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