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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)

#101

Post by jmull »

Just to be a Devil's advocate (just a little)...

Sure, 24/192 doesn't physically improve the sound you are able perceive when listening to it.

But listening to music is a highly subjective emotional experience.

If a listener cares about getting the best possible quality listening experience and feels downloading 24/192 music will achieve that, then the listener will actually enjoy music more knowing it is playing from a 24/192 source.

Listening to music is all about the feels.

Of course, I get how this can be abused. Next thing you know someone will be selling 32/320 for twice as much, then 64/480 for three times as much, etc.

Not that this kind of article isn't still really important. It is. It provides a lot of reassurance to audiophiles that they can enjoy their music to the maximum without buying into the 24/192 hype.

And that's what it's really all about: the best enjoyment of the music.

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

#102

Post by boomlinde »

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

Listening to 16bit 44.1 kHz can also damage the cilia in your ears. Whether it actually does, in both cases, of course depends on the recorded material and the playback gain.

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

#103

Post by vortico »

leetcrew wrote: post #67
vortico wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that the difference is not large. A 128 kbps opus or AAC might be comparible to a 160 or 192 kbps MP3. So it's less than 2x improvement of file size.

AAC has an additional advantage though, which is that many phones and receivers can transmit AAC files over Bluetooth without reencoding. this is technically possible for MP3 too, but very few devices implement it. the loss of quality from transcoding lossy to lossy is usually a lot worse than the difference in quality between codecs and bitrates (within reason).

Interesting, didn't know the Bluetooth fact. I don't usually deal with AAC myself, since opus is so close in every quality/feature, and the AAC patent license is sometimes costly to use commercially ($0.98 per software sale).

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

#104

Post by glitchc »

stcredzero wrote: post #81
mruts wrote: post #4

Problem with music sounding bad doesn’t really have much to do with the distributed format: V0, V1, or 320 mp3s should sound pretty much the same compared to 16-bit flac. You can only the difference between mp3 and flac at shitty bitrates no one uses anymore (like 120). The reason why a lot of recent digital music sounds bad is because of the intentionally terrible mastering. Since everyone is listening of crappy ear…

Since everyone is listening of crappy earbuds, they compress the hell out of it and destroy all dynamic range. More compression and less dynamic range is beneficial for certain environments. Noisy subways. Watching TV in a noisy downtown apartment. Basically, crappy, noisy environments. In those, compression will help you actually hear the music and speech. However, the fact that this should be done in the master is…

Isn’t radio a big factor in this? Broadcast radio is noisy and has pretty limited dynamic range. This may be a cause.

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

#105

Post by tinus_hn »

diminish wrote: post #19
teknico wrote: post #10

Already discussed. Main posts: [2012] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3668310 [2014] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8689231 [2015] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10520639 [2017] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15127633

It's a very good article which shows up again and again. Think it's 2040, singularity reached. AI runs the world and on HN we have this article popping up very frequently like every hundred Planck time unit .

It’s supposed to have (2012) in the title if it’s an old article.

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

#106

Post by mixmastamyk »

mywittyname wrote: post #97
mixmastamyk wrote: post #82

TL;DR: 24/192 is useful at the mastering stage, to avoid error creep from mixing and effects. This is way beyond human hearing however, so scaling down to 16/44.1 (CD quality) in the final mix for playback won't result in noticeable degradation. CD quality was chosen on principles of human limits. Perhaps we could give a bit of extra headroom for kicks, to widen the envelope at extremes however. A useful amount would…

Like how banks keep track of fractional pennies when calculating interest, because rounding them off at time of calculation would introduce cumulative error. Instead, they round them off at payment time.

Yes, as done in an image compositing pipelines as well, with higher resolutions and bits per pixel of color information until final output.

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

#107

Post by teilo »

tomc1985 wrote: post #88
mruts wrote: post #4

Problem with music sounding bad doesn’t really have much to do with the distributed format: V0, V1, or 320 mp3s should sound pretty much the same compared to 16-bit flac. You can only the difference between mp3 and flac at shitty bitrates no one uses anymore (like 120). The reason why a lot of recent digital music sounds bad is because of the intentionally terrible mastering. Since everyone is listening of crappy ear…

So vinyl has only about the equivalent of 10-14 bits of resolution (I don't remember the exact number I heard and it has been a while) and waveforms within our hearing range are far larger than what 192khz can potentially accomodate. The only use I've found for such high-resolution is audio is using it as base material for further effects processing... certain distortion units and whatnot that operate on a sample lev…

Yes, but we are not talking about the mixing/mastering sample rate, but the distribution sample rate/resolution.

High resolution is absolutely important in some mixing scenarios to prevent pre-ringing and aliasing in the effects chain (distortion effects or otherwise). But once you have your hi-res master, there is zero advantage to distribute it that way. At that point, a 48Khz/16-bit FLAC is as good as it gets.

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

#108

Post by matwood »

jlarcombe wrote: post #61
martin_a wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But who is using MP3 players these days any more? I found myself to buy an iPod in... like... 2011 or so. Converted all the CDs I had to FLAC because losless was the way to go. Two or three years (let it be 5, doesn't matter) pass by, I got a better Smartphone, Spotify Premium and don't touch my 1xx GB of FLAC music anymore, because I don't want to carry around another device etc. I'm not sure but I think "owning" mu…

But aren't you worried you'll lose access to your music? I have to own it! I can't have it at the whim of multiple third parties to take down as they see fit. It's too important.

So where do you store these files that you'll never lose access?

CDs? People with a room full of 8 tracks or cassettes would like to have a word.

HDDs? Those fail all the time, plus any sort of natural disaster could wipe out your collection.

Online backup? This seems like the only real option, but for me the risk/reward just doesn't fit.

At least for now, the record companies and the service providers are both incentivized to have as much of their catalogs as possible on streaming services. Until that changes, streaming works for many.

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

#109

Post by shams93 »

mruts wrote: post #4

Problem with music sounding bad doesn’t really have much to do with the distributed format: V0, V1, or 320 mp3s should sound pretty much the same compared to 16-bit flac. You can only the difference between mp3 and flac at shitty bitrates no one uses anymore (like 120). The reason why a lot of recent digital music sounds bad is because of the intentionally terrible mastering. Since everyone is listening of crappy ear…

Exactly if it’s mastered wrong the nitrate has nothing to do with the issue this music would sound just as awful cut to vinyl from a bad master. Now you just can’t hear beyond 22050 so 192 is insanely wasteful. But poor mastering is absolutely the core issue not encoding algorithms

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

#110

Post by gugagore »

vortico wrote: post #93
IWeldMelons wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Resamplers these days take advance of our faster computers to use near-brickwall filters, like a 1024-point windowed sinc. With this, you can create a steep filter from 20-22 kHz with better than -100 dBr attenuation beyond the Nyquist frequency. This is enough to stop worrying about the aliasing caused by the bandpass filter. I've never heard of what newaccoutnas is talking about, but I guess if a high-frequency sou…

Do you know what frequency is typically for the resampling? Anything like 192kHz?
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