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24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

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Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#51

Post by vortico »

bch wrote: post #39
aidenn0 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MP3s at any bitrate cannot properly reproduce certain sounds, as preecho can happen and it is fairly easy to train yourself to notice it. Pretty much any modern lossy format can be made transparent at high enough bitrates though.

Example?

Playing a set of high-frequency pure sine waves is the failure point for MP3, AAC, Vorbis, and Opus. Dial-up noises are close to this, which you can try encoding/decoding. And this is no surprise, since the point of the V.90/92 protocols is to cram as much information as possible into analog frequencies, and the point of psychoacoustic lossy codecs is to remove the least efficient frequency information of our log-frequency scaled ears.

But this is kind of a pedagogical example. Not the point of who you're responding to.

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#53

Post by IWeldMelons »

newaccoutnas wrote: post #11
PascLeRasc wrote: post #9

I have a degree in electrical engineering, and I'm currently in a graduate course on computer music systems, so I hope that qualifies me enough to avoid the author's ad hominem attacks he seasons this stinkpiece with. I can't stand seeing frequency response charts and scientific measurements in articles about audio. Like my favorite audio reviewer says [1], I listen to music for enjoyment and I talk about audio in su…

Umm, Nyquist-Shannon Theory? Listening to 24Bit 192Khz can actually damage the cillia in your ear

Bingo! Exactly, Nyquist theory. But no one can make a truly good, brickwall filter at this frequency. It is much easier to make a lot less steep frequency response, whilch would start at 22 khz and would slowly go down all the way to 96 kHz. By the way, how would it damage the ears if it was thoroughly filtered?

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#54

Post by [deleted] »

PascLeRasc wrote: post #9

I have a degree in electrical engineering, and I'm currently in a graduate course on computer music systems, so I hope that qualifies me enough to avoid the author's ad hominem attacks he seasons this stinkpiece with. I can't stand seeing frequency response charts and scientific measurements in articles about audio. Like my favorite audio reviewer says [1], I listen to music for enjoyment and I talk about audio in su…

[deleted]

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#55

Post by quattrofan »

badfrog wrote: post #24
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #5

Thanks to this article, when I torrent music that is shared in 24/192 format, I always resample to 24/96: ffmpeg -i foo.flac -ar 96000 -acodec flac bar.flac

I'm curious why you torrent music still when streaming is so widely available and free/cheap? I did a lot of torrenting back in the 2000s, but thinking back on it I spent a ton of time finding things, organizing my file system, transcoding, editing metadata, etc. I do not miss that hassle at all now.

I refuse to pay streaming subs, I buy second hand CDs for pennies and rip to flac. I'll always own my content and play it whenever/wherever I want at the best quality.

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#56

Post by mrguyorama »

IWeldMelons wrote: post #49
vortico wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you think our senses transcend what tools have the ability to measure? Maybe that was the case in 1970, but in 2000+, hearing (and vision) is completely understood scientifically and far surpassed by measuring apparatus at every frequency range. Saying otherwise is an appeal to what is called audio mysticism and is caused by placebo and confirmation bias, which was mentioned in the article.

If it was true, the entirety of hi-fi industry would not exist. I myself built a number of amplifiers and, after a certain threshold, roughly .02% THD (total harmonic distortion) at 20khz, there is a very little correlation between the THD (what is usually measured)numbers and perceived quality of the sound. Which means, while it is true that is everything could be measured, no one measures the right thing (perhaps s…

Are you suggesting that things like healing crystals work, because the market for them exists?

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#57

Post by aidenn0 »

bch wrote: post #39
aidenn0 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

MP3s at any bitrate cannot properly reproduce certain sounds, as preecho can happen and it is fairly easy to train yourself to notice it. Pretty much any modern lossy format can be made transparent at high enough bitrates though.

Example?

pre-echo will appear on very fast attacks; clapping, some types of drums and castanets are usually cited as the worst. Some styles of electronic music have fast attacks as well.

With older encoders, cymbals were terrible, but lame's psychoacoustic model is pretty good at masking those artifacts these days (at least at high bitrates).

For examples, some quick searching on hydrogen audio found a couple songs reported to be ABX distinguishable with lame and after previewing the songs, they do in fact have a lot of quick attacks:

Human Disease by Slayer (Some very fast and cleanly played drum parts; also it's mostly not snares; snares sound terrible at low bitrates, but I personally can't distinguish high-bitrate snares from uncompressed snares)

Show Me your Spine by PTP (The "instrument" used for the base rhythm has an unnaturally short attack).

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#58

Post by pjc50 »

The choice of colour analogy is unfortunate, because there really are colours that are "out of gamut" and cannot be accurately reproduced on normal monitors. If you have the opportunity to and look at one of the IKB works in person you'll see what I mean.

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/klein-ikb-79-t01513

https://contemporaryartetc.wordpress.com/2007/09/13/fact-of-...

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#59

Post by bch »

vortico wrote: post #51
bch wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Example?

Playing a set of high-frequency pure sine waves is the failure point for MP3, AAC, Vorbis, and Opus. Dial-up noises are close to this, which you can try encoding/decoding. And this is no surprise, since the point of the V.90/92 protocols is to cram as much information as possible into analog frequencies, and the point of psychoacoustic lossy codecs is to remove the least efficient frequency information of our log-fre…

So, a high frequency DTMF[0] construction should render a pre-echo? What’s the lowest definition of “high” pairs that would satisfy showing this encoding breakage but be hearable by a majority of people[1]?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-tone_multi-frequency_sign...

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presbycusis

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#60

Post by maxerickson »

aidenn0 wrote: post #36

The only rebuttal to this that I have found compelling is that 24/192 downloads make sense if you are going to sample the music in your own creations. Recording and mixing with extra dynamic range, combined with only needing to low-pass once at the end has demonstrable advantages. Of course this was a response to marketing that was definitely not targeted at samplers, so it's not so much of a rebuttal as arguing at c…

It's also not so likely that a given recording would actually have the larger dynamic range.
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