24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012) • Hacker News Board

Re: 24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#31

Post by Blackthorn » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 4:59 PM UTC

evo wrote: post #26

Blackthorn wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can generate perfect band-limited sawtooth waves at 44.1khz, there are multiple techniques for doing this and most production digital synthesizers use them. Oversampling gives you headroom for aliases for the rest of the synth that is more vulnerable to it.

Yeah, I was oversimplifying a blit, the raw waveforms are usually okay, but I distinctly remember old-school VSTs where you couldn't achieve a nice saw lead at 44.1.

It's tough to tell without specific names, but I imagine a lot of particularly old* VSTs were written to use naive sawtooths rather than perfect band-limited ones, which would have terrible aliasing at 44.1 khz. Oversampling those would help a lot!

* Some people are still making this mistake, despite information on the (many) ways to do it the right way being widely and freely available!

Re: 24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#32

Post by bellowsgulch » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:00 PM UTC

dist-epoch wrote: post #11

The whole audiophile industry is built on stuff which doesn't make any sense My favourite: "audiophile-grade" audio players which allocate a single continuous buffer of RAM into which they load/decode the whole .WAV/.FLAC file, because supposedly the CPU "jumping" between "fragmented audio" causes audible "jitter". Of course, they don't know that what looks like continuous memory to user-code is probably discontinuou…

The latter is probably true, but the former does actually happen, and it's easy to accidentally do--lossless or not.

Re: 24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#33

Post by z_open » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:00 PM UTC

As they say, most people listen to their music with equipment. Audiophiles listen to their equipment with music.

Re: 24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#34

Post by wat10000 » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:01 PM UTC

Tsarp wrote: post #8

This really is driving a muscle/super car, or drinking expensive wine. At the end none of specs or tests matter. It is a form of art. If it makes the listener feel better (even if its just psychological) then its probably worth it.

I'd distinguish between differences that anyone can detect but some may not care about, and differences that may not be objectively detectable at all. Muscle cars, at least, are different in a way that anyone can see. Push that pedal to the floor and it feels different from a Honda Civic or whatever. Whether that difference is actually interesting or good is, of course, a matter of taste. Whereas audiophile nonsense is often indistinguishable even to the connoisseur and depends entirely on some form of self-deception. Still could be worth it, depending on what one considers worthy.

Re: 24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#35

Post by rahimnathwani » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

The article says "I've run across a few articles and blog posts that declare the virtues of 24 bit or 96/192kHz by comparing a CD to an audio DVD (or SACD) of the 'same' recording. This comparison is invalid; the masters are usually different."

It may be simultaneously true that:

A) Humans cannot tell the difference between 44.1kHz/16-bit audio and any higher resolution, and

B) For a particular song, the best commercially available 44.1kHz/16-bit version may not be the best commercially available version

Re: 24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#36

Post by lmc » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:02 PM UTC

dist-epoch wrote: post #11

The whole audiophile industry is built on stuff which doesn't make any sense My favourite: "audiophile-grade" audio players which allocate a single continuous buffer of RAM into which they load/decode the whole .WAV/.FLAC file, because supposedly the CPU "jumping" between "fragmented audio" causes audible "jitter". Of course, they don't know that what looks like continuous memory to user-code is probably discontinuou…

> My favourite: "audiophile-grade" audio players which allocate a single contignuous buffer of RAM into which they load/decode the whole .WAV/.FLAC file, because supposedly the CPU "jumping" between "fragmented memory" causes audible "jitter".

Thanks for the laugh... this is absolutely bonkers. In case anyone is wondering, before sound hits our ears it has to go through a digital to analog conversion, which takes place on hardware independent of the CPU, operating with its own clock and buffers etc.

Re: 24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#37

Post by Blackthorn » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:03 PM UTC

jerf wrote: post #28

If you can't hear the squeals of the plants [1] in the studio's reception area, are you really getting the full experience of a piece of music? [1]: https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/30/world/plants-make-sounds-scn

Oh great. And here I thought that fantasy literature where forest elves could hear the screams of the plants they stepped on when they walked was just that -- fantasy.

Re: 24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#38

Post by platinumrad » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:04 PM UTC

dist-epoch wrote: post #11

The whole audiophile industry is built on stuff which doesn't make any sense My favourite: "audiophile-grade" audio players which allocate a single continuous buffer of RAM into which they load/decode the whole .WAV/.FLAC file, because supposedly the CPU "jumping" between "fragmented audio" causes audible "jitter". Of course, they don't know that what looks like continuous memory to user-code is probably discontinuou…

Don't forget: "most players use malloc to get memory while new is the c++ method and sounds better."[1]

[1] https://www.audioasylum.com/messages/pcaudio/119979/

Re: 24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#39

Post by gizajob » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:04 PM UTC

Blackthorn wrote: post #16

dijit wrote: post #3

huh... So I guess the programmer equivalent is distributing .pdb's (or, symbols)

Pretty good analogy. Thing is though, the person who receives the 16-bit, 44.1khz music file can always upsample it to 192khz and not lose anything in the process (heck, lots of audio stuff oversamples internally to this level or beyond, for extra aliasing headroom!). I'm not sure about expansion from 16bit to 24bit though, downward expansion isn't necessarily perfect.

You’d be adding 150khz and 8bits of nothing.

Re: 24-bit/192kHz music downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

#40

Post by mock-possum » Thu, Jul 02, 2026, 5:05 PM UTC

Tsarp wrote: post #8

This really is driving a muscle/super car, or drinking expensive wine. At the end none of specs or tests matter. It is a form of art. If it makes the listener feel better (even if its just psychological) then its probably worth it.

That’s actually a really good comparison, especially because - yes I can hear the difference between an excruciatingly lossless digitization of a piece of music that I’m intimately familiar with, played back on expertly configured hardware… but the difference is so little, that most of the time, I’m find just listening to it at medium high quality streaming on a pair of I’ve played with the nice toys, and they are nice, but for 100x the price, they barely deliver 1.5x the experience.