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

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

#251

Post by raxxorraxor »

stego-tech wrote: post #54

I cannot hear the difference between 16/44.1 (and by extension, 16/48) and High-Res Content generally, be they HDCD, SACD, or just straight-up Masters from Qobuz. This is on multiple sets of equipment, ranging from El Cheapo earbuds all the way to HD800 cans and full-fledged tower speakers being bi-amped. That’s not why I go for High-Res stuff, though. It’s all about archival, at least for me. With a 24/192 Master in…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48774112 <-- Here is a test. I would have said the same and I played all samples quite often. It is extremely subtle, but even with a cheap headset it is possible to hear differences, where the high quality version is just a little bit clearer.

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

#252

Post by amluto »

saltcured wrote: post #85
stego-tech wrote: post #54

I cannot hear the difference between 16/44.1 (and by extension, 16/48) and High-Res Content generally, be they HDCD, SACD, or just straight-up Masters from Qobuz. This is on multiple sets of equipment, ranging from El Cheapo earbuds all the way to HD800 cans and full-fledged tower speakers being bi-amped. That’s not why I go for High-Res stuff, though. It’s all about archival, at least for me. With a 24/192 Master in…

Decades ago, I was treated to an ABX test in my brother's recording studio. I easily recognized and preferred a 24/192 master he played versus the 16/44.1 down-mix. I honestly don't know whether there was something wrong with the down-mix, but qualitatively it did feel like it was "muffled" and coming from speakers, while the master really felt like live performance. He was surprised that I could tell them apart. I a…

One possibility (pure speculation) is a bad antialiasing filter. The Nyquist frequency at 44.1ksps is 22.05kHz, which is only ~10% above the audible band. This means that you need a rather sharp filter both when downmixing and when playing to avoid potentially audible aliasing into the audible band or attenuation within the audible band.

If you look at a site like audiosciencereview.com and pull up measurements of a DAC or ADC, you can find graphs of the antialiasing filter response. Some are great and some are not.

One could think of 16/44.1 PCM as being a codec that is potentially perfect but requiring some degree of care to encode and decode correctly.

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

#253

Post by vitamark »

pimeys wrote: post #113
WarmWash wrote: post #47

Foobar2000 has an extension that allows you to blindly test whether you can tell the difference between two tracks.[1] The prime use is to compare different encodings of the same song from the same lossless master. It kind of changed me a bit when I ran through 20 lossless tracks I had re-encoded to various mp3 bitrates and realized that even on a fancy system, it can be really hard if not impossible to discern even…

But try out to stream that mp3 from your home server in lower bitrate to save data, e.g. as opus. And now you suddenly hear the lossy encoding. We store files in the highest quality because it gives us the option to encode the music without audible loss of quality.

I personally encode flacs as 192/256k opus from the start and that's fairly enough for most data save purposes, so no reencode for streaming is needed

that's a bitrate of 1GB per 9-12h, and for cases when it's too much I just have cached music on my device (I'm lucky to have mostly empty storage on my 256gb phone)

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

#254

Post by bzzzt »

Applejinx wrote: post #250
bzzzt wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Generally all of these "debates" come down to people who think math > circuitry. All real designs are imperfect trade-offs. They all have issues, and arguing as if converters are perfect when they never are, and the imperfections can be benched objectively, is... not very scientific. There is one purely objective benchmark: a true blind test. You can believe if something is different or not, but if nobody's capably…

You're missing a few words. To be correct you would have to have said 'if nobody's capable of hearing the difference every single time beyond a statistical doubt, does it matter?' You can say that and be correct, while also sounding a little more silly than perhaps you'd like. edit: rather than go even harder, I'm instead going to suggest it's perfectly fine to care about things you don't hear every single time, but…

Oh, I care about audio quality a lot more than most people, but not into 'magic cable' territory.

There's no reason you can't gather statistics about a representative part of the population. It doesn't make sense to make the entire world pay for better audio because some guy somewhere might be a bit more sensitive and he thinks it ruins everything.

I don't know if such a person exists, but especially in the 'magic' audio territory there's a big amount of bullsh*t going on. There's a reason the James Randi price was never claimed.

There's a huge difference between digital 'distortions' caused by sampling at CD quality and things like tape flutter which most people can actually hear. Even then, some people like the imperfections like vinyl or tape artifacts. Some people even prefer MP3 compressed music.

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

#255

Post by amluto »

guenthert wrote: post #232
nok22kon wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rode NT1-A 5th gen microphone claims 32-bit float output, insisting it will not clip peaks so maybe they do sample at 24 bit at a well chosen gain level and then convert to 32 bit float, with the max 24 bit value being above 1.0 float or as GP said, use two separate ADCs at two different gains and combine their output

> use two separate ADCs at two different gains and combine their output That's what could be done if ADCs were perfectly linear and noise free and limited only by their bit-width. Sadly, they are not. The non-linearity one can in theory measure and correct for, but the noise can be corrected for only by oversampling. And then you might as well use a single ADC of lesser bit width and higher sampling rate.

I feel like you’re arguing against a straw man.

No one is arguing that there are practical audio microphones + ADCs that produce accurate, undistorted 32-bit float output across the full representable range. But they don’t need to! For professional use, the ability to produce perceptually accurate output, with inaudible noise, across a very wide dynamic range, is extremely useful. Think of it as fancy, real-time AGC. It does not need to be perfect. If you can record a loud transient without substantial distortion, and also record sounds with 2^16-fold lower amplitude (~96dB lower) while still remaining well above the noise floor immediately after the transient is gone, this ability is useful. Plenty of real-world noises are well above 120dB, and plenty of human-audible sounds are below 20dB. You can’t play back the recording, at least not without making parts inaudible or injuring your audience, but you can edit it. And a setup like this lets you do it with one microphone and no fiddling with gains in advance.

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

#256

Post by bzzzt »

bob1029 wrote: post #249
bzzzt wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those things have huge drivers and are probably too big for a lot of rooms. Unless you (and your neighbors) absolutely want to have that thumping sound and you go out of your way to kill unwanted bass reflection you're probably better off with the HS5 or something similar.

8" is not a huge driver. The point with these is to avoid the need for a separate subwoofer for most program material.

It's the biggest model in the Yamaha monitor series and if you care about bass that much you probably also want a subwoofer ;)

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

#257

Post by IshKebab »

stego-tech wrote: post #54

I cannot hear the difference between 16/44.1 (and by extension, 16/48) and High-Res Content generally, be they HDCD, SACD, or just straight-up Masters from Qobuz. This is on multiple sets of equipment, ranging from El Cheapo earbuds all the way to HD800 cans and full-fledged tower speakers being bi-amped. That’s not why I go for High-Res stuff, though. It’s all about archival, at least for me. With a 24/192 Master in…

That's not really how down sampling works. You already have all the information with 48 kHz sampling.

Higher rate sampling is just like storing integers to 3 decimal places, or archiving an upscaled DVD.

I recommend you actually read the article. I vaguely recall they did it in video form too.

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

#258

Post by Archit3ch »

adrian_b wrote: post #220
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My comment should have been more emphatic that: nobody uses AD converters that generate 32 bit floating point values natively when recording, or anywhere close to the resolution that format implies. I am extremely aware that as a data format in DAWs and other recorders, 32 bit floating point is completely common.

While the best that ADCs can provide is linear 24-bit audio samples, the following audio processing is better done after converting the samples to FP32, and keeping this format until the final 16-bit encoded audio suitable for listening is generated. For the same reason, video processing is preferably done on FP16 samples of the color components even if both the input ADCs and the output video signal may use only 10-…

> the following audio processing is better done after converting the samples to FP32

Or, in some cases, FP64.

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

#259

Post by Archit3ch »

nullc wrote: post #140
evo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

24/192 is also great for digital synthesizers--if you're generating a waveform like a sawtooth that has theoretically instantaneous transitions, they can eat as much frequency as you can give them. Running at 44khz loses noticeable high-end content. Most modern digital synths have already caught onto this and run internally at much higher sampling rates even if their output gets downsampled, but sometimes you run acr…

> 24/192 is also great for digital synthesizers--if you're generating a waveform like a sawtooth that has theoretically instantaneous transitions, they can eat as much frequency as you can give them. So if your synthesizers do not use proper band-limited oscillators then 192KHz is _FAR_ too slow. You'd want to be running at hundreds of KHz, perhaps a few MHz. In reality synth software that doesn't sound like crap use…

> I think given how fast computers have become relative to digital audio there is probably a good case to just make any "modular synth" run at 32-bit 480KHz or even 4.8MHz through every stage that could process the audio.

1. It should run at FP64 if you want to preserve filter resonances, etc.

2. At 10x/100x fixed-rate oversampling, even a modern "fast" CPU will have very few cycles per (higher-rate) sample to run the DSP for 1 "module" of the software modular. Forget about interconnected modules, multiple tracks, or polyphony. For this kind of "analog"-style processing, it's better to run adaptive-rate algorithms (think SPICE) instead of wasting compute on unnecessary extra audio samples.

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

#260

Post by hobonation »

RijilV wrote: post #90
hobonation wrote: post #52

Counter: An ultra high bit rate solves the problem and you can stop worrying if it's the weakest link. You can the focus on other things. Example: I Bought the best skis possible. Now I know I need to just focus on my skills and not blame the equipment.

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but high end skis make tradeoffs which are harmful to beginner or intermediate level skiers... also there's sorta no thing as "best ski". what you'd want for high speed bombing double blacks is going to be different from off piste or moguls or snow park fun.... double also, skis wear out. Depending on who you want to believe it's as low as 20-30 days. Which, granted the averag…

You're acting like I don't have everything from Hellbents all the way to Fisher GS skis all the way into Vole Scaled Skis for Telemarking. Just don't buy shit, and you don't get to blame the equipment.

And none of them are broken after 20 days unless it's low tide or I fuck up on a cliff band. I ski a minimum of 100 days a year, and the only thing you can notice after 60 days is some slight decambering on softer skis.

I will say that boots tend to get soft around 100 days. But usually dealing with that's also a skill issue; get good balance, and you don't have to have the boot hold your sorry form in place. It's how people basically skied for a thousand years with leather boots: They were good.

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