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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)

#191

Post by stcredzero »

Symbiote wrote: post #177
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…

In the 1990s, car stereos sometimes had a "loudness" button which did exactly as you suggest.

Going back, seemingly forever, home stereos also had a "loudness" button. Many still do. Usually, there's just some equalization involved, so it's not exactly what I'm suggesting.

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

#192

Post by jabl »

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…

> More compression and less dynamic range is beneficial for certain environments. Noisy subways. Watching TV in a noisy downtown apartment. Basically, crappy, noisy environments.

Good point, I think particularly for movies or such this makes sense. I want to be able to watch a movie such that I hear what the characters are speaking, without blowing my windows out of their frames during some action scene. Yes, I realize in real life explosions, guns etc. are really loud, and this makes the movie less realistic.

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

#193

Post by paulmd »

PaulHoule wrote: post #156
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…

Dynamic range is a solved problem if people cared. You attach some metadata to the audio file that says certain parts should be level boosted in a noisy environment and there you go.

And this is not a theoretical solution, this is literally just ReplayGain operating in track-level mode.

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

#194

Post by ovao »

KerrickStaley wrote: post #164

Question: Is 192 kHz better when you want to slow down (or speed up) a track significantly while keeping pitches the same? Does it produce less noticeable artifacts? When DJing, I often speed up or slow down a track I'm cueing in order to match the tempo of the playing song. So having 192 kHz tracks might be better (although usually you try not to change a song's tempo too far from the original anyway).

Not likely. The DAC will almost invariably oversample anyway, and even though stretching may not happen in a high-sampling-frequency domain, the result eventually does.

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

#195

Post by wl »

vortico wrote: post #14
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…

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.

> [I]n 2000+, hearing (and vision) is completely understood scientifically and far surpassed by measuring apparatus at every frequency range

Yes, we have instrumentation better than the meat-based transducers in the human body. That doesn't mean we completely understand said meat-based transducers or how that meat-computer in our skull interprets signals from those transducers. The auditory and visual systems are still subjects of active research with many outstanding problems.

I mean, I'll be among the first to call bullshit on audiophile snake-oil like people pushing 192 kHz/24 bit music, but in your rush to discredit such things, you've gone too far in the other direction.

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

#196

Post by thegeomaster »

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…

Radio stations often do additional processing of music to make it louder and more crisp when played on a car stereo, often by using techniques such as multi-band compression: the sounds is decomposed into several bands, and each band has dynamic range compression applied with different parameters to maximize the perceived sharpness/loudness.

It destroys a lot of subtlety and sonic detail in the original, but in exchange you get an overall louder, more in-your-face sound, with highs that come through even on bad audio systems. On car stereos, where you have a lot of low-frequency rumbling sounds, this especially makes a difference. And if you ask a random person to give a subjective quality assessment of original vs that processed audio, they'll almost always feel as if the latter is of higher quality.

For more info see e.g. [1].

[1]: https://www.soundonsound.com/techniques/multi-band-compressi..., section "Broadcast Applications for Multi-Band Compression."

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

#198

Post by mrob »

rixrax wrote: post #128
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…

Here is a link[0] to CD dynamic range database from where you can check how a particular mastering fares. [0] http://dr.loudness-war.info There are of course multitude of other factors impacting mastering quality, but as far as DR goes, this DB is a pretty good source.

This website is a useful resource, but it has some limitations. The algorithm used does not take into account the frequency response of the human ear. If a track contains a lot of very deep bass, it's possible for it to have a low DR score but still sound like it has a high dynamic range. The measurement can also be fooled by surface noise and filtering when measuring vinyl:

https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)#Ef...

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

#199

Post by ovao »

IWeldMelons wrote: post #126
mrguyorama wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You are putting words in my mouth. I am telling what I actually verified. Amplifiers with lower THD and IMD often sound worse than those with less impressive meausured parameters. Ergo, the measured parameters are not relevant. We need to find the actually important paramters and measure them.

But “sounds worse” in this case is relevant only to your preferences and to the preferences of some N of listeners, where N is totally unknown. The parameters you believe amp manufacturers should measure are therefore only relevant to your idea about them.

THD, SNR, frequency response and many other metrics are easy: they define either accuracy or precision. If you want more than that, add external affects hardware or DSP. The purpose of the amplifier is to amplify.

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

#200

Post by wnevets »

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…

> (there are some exceptions, like the Beatles mono and stereo boxed sets that came out awhile ago)

Didn't the beatles famously create their music to be listenable on the terrible radios of the time?

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