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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)

#181

Post by drderidder »

rurp wrote: post #173

I have a related question that someone here probably has a good answer for. I recently heard a song I like on the radio while driving. Shortly after it played I pulled up the same song on Spotify with my phone, plugged my phone into the car stereo through the headphone jack, and played it. The quality was MUCH worse. What's the likely reason for that? I know very little about audio but my best guesses are: 1. The med…

I don't know if this is still common practice, but radio edits were often mastered differently back when I briefly studied music production. The station also likely uses signal processing to compress the dynamic range and increase the "loudness". Listening in a car is quite different than listening on home audio equipment, hence the different processing.

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

#182

Post by ecocentrik »

rurp wrote: post #173

I have a related question that someone here probably has a good answer for. I recently heard a song I like on the radio while driving. Shortly after it played I pulled up the same song on Spotify with my phone, plugged my phone into the car stereo through the headphone jack, and played it. The quality was MUCH worse. What's the likely reason for that? I know very little about audio but my best guesses are: 1. The med…

3. The A/D converter used by your car stereo headphone jack is low quality and introduced sampling artifacts.

4. You have a high definition radio and were listening to a high quality digital signal over FM as opposed to an FM analog signal.

It's probably a combination of all of these.

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

#183

Post by justin66 »

gwbas1c wrote: post #170

When I casually researched the upper limit of human hearing, I came across something that mentioned that some people can detect lowpass filtering up to 27khz. That's less than half an octave over the "traditional" 20khz limit. Even the 20khz limit is more of an average then a strict biological limit. It also means that a sampling rate somewhere at 54khz is the "ideal" limit when trying to pick a sampling frequency th…

> When I casually researched the upper limit of human hearing, I came across something that mentioned that some people can detect lowpass filtering up to 27khz.

Link?

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

#184

Post by leetcrew »

mark-r wrote: post #153
leetcrew wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Even though it's theoretically possible to send over Bluetooth without reencoding, I wonder if it happens in practice. The audio pipeline has too many stages and each of them would have to retain the encoding.

good point. the developer settings on my pixel 2 allow me to set the preferred codec, but I've never dug into it enough to know whether the setting is actually honored. all my music is MP3 anyway so it's going to sound awful over Bluetooth no matter what.

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

#185

Post by ovao »

glitchc wrote: post #104
stcredzero wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Radio is actually compressed in real-time by use of broadcast compressors, so they solve the problem rather directly.

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

#186

Post by zepearl »

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…

> This is also why modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital: they are mastered differently since its assumed everyone is going to be listening on good equipment.

Sorry, I don't know much about sound so here comes probably the most stupid question of the day (but hope never dies):

does this mean that I might get better sound if I would buy a vinyl & one of those turntables which can directly digitize to USB, then if I would buy & download the digital song directly (or maybe even the CD)? Thx

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

#187

Post by AsyncAwait »

nirvdrum wrote: post #41
mark-r wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I rip my CDs in a two-step process: first to FLAC, then convert to mp3. The mp3s go in my phone, I have 33GB so far and my collection isn't even half ripped. I haven't checked how big the FLACs are lately but I'm sure they'd be a much bigger burden.

Slightly off topic, but do you use something other than iTunes for this process? I'm looking for a good way to manage a FLAC library.

As far as I am aware, iTunes is not even able to play back FLACs, so when I am on a Mac, I use Clementine, (https://www.clementine-player.org), or cmus, (https://cmus.github.io).

Converting etc. I do exclusively on my Linux desktop, so can't help you there.

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

#188

Post by em500 »

jrace wrote: post #154
widerporst wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. Are you sure you were using the right settings and a recent version of LAME for this? The only artifact I can reliably hear in 320 kbps MP3s is pre-echo, for instance with castanets, and only in a few very specific situations. Apart from this, V2 and above sounds completely indistinguishable from the original to me.

Which is great ...for you... but what if in the future you could hear the differences? And now your entire collection is in MP3 V2 - now what? No reason to not rip everything in uncompressed FLAC these days. But if your happy with your audio now, great!

The reverse is overwhelmingly more likely. For 8khz+ frequencies (where most compression takes place) your hearing declines pretty quickly once you hit 30 years. Whatever real compression differences you're hearing at 20 will be largely gone 10 years later, and almost certainly 20 years later.

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

#189

Post by jrace »

em500 wrote: post #188
jrace wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is great ...for you... but what if in the future you could hear the differences? And now your entire collection is in MP3 V2 - now what? No reason to not rip everything in uncompressed FLAC these days. But if your happy with your audio now, great!

The reverse is overwhelmingly more likely. For 8khz+ frequencies (where most compression takes place) your hearing declines pretty quickly once you hit 30 years. Whatever real compression differences you're hearing at 20 will be largely gone 10 years later, and almost certainly 20 years later.

Not quite 30 -> 55+ is where we would expect to see presbycusis,

And even though you may have diminished hearing you still have awareness of frequencies above 8Khz.

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

#190

Post by shmerl »

byproxy wrote: post #162
shmerl wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Opus for music playback for all my archived music. The reason it's not more widespread was opposition of the likes of Apple to free codecs. Today they are losing this, and Opus is making its way even to Apple's systems.

Is there a particular reason you don't opt for lossless formats (e.g. FLAC) for your music archive? I imagine the only constraint would be space, though storage gets cheaper by the year.

I use FLAC for storage, and Opus for playback. I.e. in essence I use both. The benefit of lossless is ability to re-encode later to any new codec (Opus-next?) if it will be useful. For playback, transparent Opus is good since it takes less space.

I.e. in practice - in my main archive I use FLAC. On some portable players and etc. I use Opus encoded from that FLAC.

That's why I always try to buy music in FLAC when possible and stores like Bandcamp are great for it.

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