24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012) • Hacker News Board

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

#441

Post by JohnBooty » Sat, Sep 02, 2017, 1:04 PM UTC

justin66 wrote: post #355

JohnBooty wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the 24/192 downloads or SACD releases are often the only way to hear the album with real dynamic range. Yeah, this is often true. Some of Green Day's (a band I've never previously been into) albums were released in 24/192 or 24/96 a few years back and they actually sounded really great, with real dynamic range. Also true? The completely absurd fact that sometimes a vinyl rip of an album will actually have the highest…

> Yeah, this is often true. Some of Green Day's (a band I've never previously been into) albums were released in 24/192 or 24/96 a few years back and they actually sounded really great, with real dynamic range. Back in the day you'd occasionally see remastered "gold" discs released. The advertising made a big deal about the disc material. Those probably sounded different too (they managed to sell them at a great prem…

Yeah. And you know, as a casual audiophile, that's my big frustration with this hobby. There's so much bullshit marketing (and audiophiles who believe it) that it really gives the whole hobby a bad name. (On the bright side, there are a lot of objective audiophiles and with just a little bit of knowledge you can get fantastic sound for very little money...)

    The label probably didn't give Green Day a huge amount of
    money for production when they made Dookie, for example,
    but it eventually sold 20 million copies and additional 
    production made sense.

I don't know about Dookie but their latter albums were recorded with full dynamic range and then squashed down into loudness-wars style mush.

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

#442

Post by zkSNARK » Sat, Sep 02, 2017, 3:37 PM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #98

zkSNARK wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an engineer, those extra samples are never wasted, and as a listener, I could care less about the "wasted space." Drive space is meaningless at this point. When I buy a piece of audio, give me the highest quality available and I will make my own decisions regarding the frequency I want to listen to it at. The reasons behind not giving the user the highest quality possible all sound like a misguided excuse to preve…

So 192/1024? 1024/4M? 1G/1T? Like is there a practical limit for you when you say "highest quality possible"?

I see no issue with storing 24/192 multichannel audio like what comes on blu-ray audio discs, or DSD streams. For my current hard drive situation, I could store 5 GB per song and easily have enough space to have a very large catalog. But drive space is only getting cheaper.

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

#443

Post by photojosh » Mon, Sep 04, 2017, 1:05 AM UTC

exikyut wrote: post #130

photojosh wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher frequencies aren't even in most recordings, so we wouldn't have to re-record them for that reason. And if they were (such as in 96 kHz hi-res audio), you could just run it through a low-pass filter to strip off the higher frequencies.

Ah, good point. And... heh, using a filter to strip out the audio we used all that extra filesize to deliberately store. Haha. :)

My webapp manages photos for photography competitions. People upload 30MB JPEGs that would be visually lossless at a tenth of that file size. And I keep the originals, but actually resize down to 300KB for every function within the software. Haven't had a single complaint about image quality... :)

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

#444

Post by 72deluxe » Tue, Sep 05, 2017, 12:25 PM UTC

Applejinx wrote: post #417

vkreso wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The same in electronic music since there are many repeating sounds. 128kbps just sounds bad, especially on a proper sound system.

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'…

Doesn't this mean going past the 85 dBA limit in headphones? That's instant hearing loss.

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

#445

Post by jchanimal » Wed, Sep 06, 2017, 10:52 PM UTC

stephen_g wrote: post #121

jchanimal wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard (and it passes the smell test) that even if your ears can't resonate at frequencies higher than human hearing, the space you are in can, and your ears are sensitive to the differences in arrival time that are smaller than the pitches we can't hear. So at least in high sample rate music the imaging could potentially be cleaner. Assuming super great everything else.

What you're sort of describing - having more of the higher frequencies resonate together - can actually cause intermodulation distortion (which itself can be in the audible range), which can make it sound worse... I haven't had time to check the linked article but if it's the one I'm thinking of I'm pretty sure it goes into this. In the end though, double blind testing (again, I think mentioned in the article) shows…

I think it's the intermodalation distortion or as I call it "the room sound" that your non-conscious mind perceives. The best example of this I've heard is when listening to identical masters on SACD/DSD vs PCM audio. Notably different sound when reproduced via loudspeakers.