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Does pono's 24-bit audio matter? Hear for yourself.

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Re: Does pono's 24-bit audio matter? Hear for yourself.

#51

Post by sp332 »

jrabone wrote: post #40
sp332 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's the discussion on that Dell issue. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7205759 "Simply said, the sound card outputs at max 10W, and the speakers only can take 6W in, and neither their BIOS or drivers block this."

That's actually good design - the intention being that any clipping can only be due to software (which you can fix), not underpowered amplification hardware (which you can't).

It's certainly a software issue, but the fault is in the BIOS, not VLC.

Re: Does pono's 24-bit audio matter? Hear for yourself.

#52

Post by rrrooss »

jrabone wrote: post #38
rrrooss wrote: post #28

There has been a lot of talk about quantative aspects of but little about the qualitative. What does a 18khz square wave look like wher recorded and reproduced in 44.1 kHz. How is phase affecte?. Phase of an audio signal reaching the ears helps you perceive distance and position. How many samples are used to represent the frequencies at the higher end of the audible range. What is the quantization error difference be…

An 18 kHz square wave sampled at 44 kHz looks like an 18 kHz sine wave, everything after the fundamental frequency is well outside the Nyquist limit and will have been thrown away by anti-aliasing filters. And furthermore you couldn't hear it even if it wasn't. Fourier decomposition of a square wave gives the sum of odd multiples of the fundamental, the next frequency is 3 x 18 kHz = 54 kHz.

Okay now actually look at the response on Matlab. As you get closer to the nyquist freq there are less samples to describe the wave. And while you get a bastadised 18k signal it's a far throw from what you put in. Anf while most are crying your splitting hairs the frequency response and dynamic range arguments pale in comparison to making the exact wave you put into the encoder come out. On the right system with the right recording the tiniest nuance in a room reverb helps trick your brain into believing the sound as actually happening. And this is not important to all listeners. But people saying that it makes no difference and is not important as a format to release music in are thinking only of their current needs and experiences. If you have actually heard a good recording on a good system in a good room you will know what I'm talking about. If listening experience has been laptop speakers, headphones and your mum and dads mini system then I totally agree any more than 320kbs mp3s are overkill. But to say that high res formats gave no place in consumer land is to show your lack of understanding of different people and different needs. In the age of iTunes you surely you buy the album and download it in whatever format u see fit. If u think audiophiles are wackos go get ya 320's. I would like to get it as I came fr the studio. The best it can be is as it came from the studio.

Re: Does pono's 24-bit audio matter? Hear for yourself.

#53

Post by ANTSANTS »

Shivetya wrote: post #3
tmikaeld wrote: post #2

It's not only the difference (or none) between 16 or 24-bit, but it's mostly about the quality of the DAC that is being used - in this case a very high-end one. Then again, it's been proven time and time again that the average person can't even hear the difference between mp3 or FLAC. Considering you'd also need proper high-end monitor headphones, i believe this is more about marketing, the brand and the pitch than i…

without the big name attached I doubt it would have had much traction. Its merely a very good marketing exercise. Snake oil for the 21st century. No better than all the joke techies used to make about HDMI cables. I always like Alan Parson's quote, audiophiles use your music to listen to their equipment

A 24-bit sample depth is not completely useless and silly in the way that gold plated HDMI cables are. You can get a real improvement in dynamic range with 24-bit samples, allowing a song to have quiet parts and loud parts with no loss in quality in either, which is hard to do with 16-bit samples without losing quality for the quiet parts or using dynamic range compression and having everything sound roughly the same.

Of course, few people actually want impressive shifts in volume in their music, because prog is dead and no one wants their headphones to suddenly blow their eardrums out. Gotta compress the shit out of that dubstep for the kiddies! Somewhat ironically, greater bit depth in audio makes a bigger difference for film than most music because of this.

Re: Does pono's 24-bit audio matter? Hear for yourself.

#54

Post by jrabone »

rrrooss wrote: post #52
jrabone wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An 18 kHz square wave sampled at 44 kHz looks like an 18 kHz sine wave, everything after the fundamental frequency is well outside the Nyquist limit and will have been thrown away by anti-aliasing filters. And furthermore you couldn't hear it even if it wasn't. Fourier decomposition of a square wave gives the sum of odd multiples of the fundamental, the next frequency is 3 x 18 kHz = 54 kHz.

Okay now actually look at the response on Matlab. As you get closer to the nyquist freq there are less samples to describe the wave. And while you get a bastadised 18k signal it's a far throw from what you put in. Anf while most are crying your splitting hairs the frequency response and dynamic range arguments pale in comparison to making the exact wave you put into the encoder come out. On the right system with the…

First off, forget about MP3; I'm not arguing for a lossy standard.

You can't get an 18 kHz square wave out of a system with 44 kHz sampling. You need at least 1 harmonic before it'll even LOOK square, and that requires a frequency response out to 54 kHz, ie. a sampling frequency of 108 kHz. You CERTAINLY won't find one in a reverb tail, even assuming you had a generator for one in the first place (you might JUST get one from a cymbal crash, but I don't think the physics works)

The point being, your source material can't contain an 18 kHz square wave either since it's been through a studio production system with the same antialiasing filters.

Since you know nothing about me but seem to be making assumptions anyway, here's some background. I've worked in broadcast audio; I own studio recordings in 24 bit / 192 kHz (Linn release of Mozart's Requiem, studio master series). I also own studio equipment that can actually play it. Audiophiles are, by and large, cash cows for companies with no scruples.

Re: Does pono's 24-bit audio matter? Hear for yourself.

#55

Post by ferongr »

jrabone wrote: post #35
ferongr wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

VLC doesn't soft-clip to my knowledge.

From previous discussion, quoting 'jbk' VLC allows amplification of the INPUT above the sound that was decoded. This is just like replay gain, broken codecs, badly recorded files or post-amplification and can lead to saturation. ... snip ... At worse, this will reduce the dynamics and saturate a lot, but this is not going to break your hardware. Except it can - because the saturation skews the power distribution towa…

I was talking about soft-clipping, not clipping in general. I know that the volume control in VLC can increase the gain of the signal beyond full scale.

Re: Does pono's 24-bit audio matter? Hear for yourself.

#56

Post by rrrooss »

jrabone wrote: post #54
rrrooss wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay now actually look at the response on Matlab. As you get closer to the nyquist freq there are less samples to describe the wave. And while you get a bastadised 18k signal it's a far throw from what you put in. Anf while most are crying your splitting hairs the frequency response and dynamic range arguments pale in comparison to making the exact wave you put into the encoder come out. On the right system with the…

First off, forget about MP3; I'm not arguing for a lossy standard. You can't get an 18 kHz square wave out of a system with 44 kHz sampling. You need at least 1 harmonic before it'll even LOOK square, and that requires a frequency response out to 54 kHz, ie. a sampling frequency of 108 kHz. You CERTAINLY won't find one in a reverb tail, even assuming you had a generator for one in the first place (you might JUST get…

Good an audio nerd. I am making the point about the square wave close to the nyquist to point out the short comings of a format for accurately reproducing an input. Square waves in the real world are rare but I am arguing for a format that produces the most accurate representation of the intended signal. Imagine the situation where i have my guitar cab set up and I have a square wave (distortion) coming out of it and I far mic it up so as to capture the room a give a feeling of space. To really feel like your there you would want the resulting complex wave made up of the 18k direct sound from the cab and the room response a recording medium that can't do that accurately is second rate especialy when the formats are out there. And the higher the sample rate the further from the nyquist that 18k is and the more samples that can be used to describe the resulting wave an the more convinced my brain is that sound is real.

Re: Does pono's 24-bit audio matter? Hear for yourself.

#57

Post by DanBC »

joshstrange wrote: post #36
ygra wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The six times figure is for 192kbps and 24 bit. The move from 16 to 24 bit alone would just result in an increase of 50 %.

Do you have a source for this? I was under the impression that: filesize(192kbps + 16bit) = 6*filesize(192kbps + 24bits) Also the point of both articles is that: You can't hear the difference. Look at MP3 vs WAV (or FLAC), MP3 won out (for consumers) because of it's filesize being so much smaller. Look at the compression differences: >> Uncompressed audio as stored on an audio-CD has a bit rate of 1,411.2 kbit/s,[not…

It's not even about file size or quality. People want mp3 because all their devices and software use mp3.

Betamax didn't lose to VHS because it was worse.

Re: Does pono's 24-bit audio matter? Hear for yourself.

#58

Post by danbee »

pokes wrote: post #9

The author is likely using a 16-bit audio card to listen to the result, which is going to clip the least significant bits off anyway. If you undo the shifting with sox -v 4096, the quantization noise in the 16-bit version is audible, even on laptop speakers.

It's probably worth pointing out that what you can hear there is dither noise. Quantization noise sounds far worse.

Re: Does pono's 24-bit audio matter? Hear for yourself.

#59

Post by danbee »

calinet6 wrote: post #42
acomjean wrote: post #23

I have pretty good headphones (Sony MDR-V6). I can hear decently enough (although getting older). Like I noticed that the Deutche Gramaphone 111 years music collection I bought (256kbps mp3s) has taped performances from the 70 & 80s which have some tape his. Honestly as an end user its really good enough. If I was remixing this stuff and processing the audio I would want the non-compressed. (similar to shooting Raw p…

> Sometimes I think people get worked up about the quality of the recording and ignore the quality of the performance. This is the main problem with audiophiles. Improve your equipment until it makes your music awesome, then just enjoy it.

"Normal people use their equipment to listen to music. Audiophiles use music to listen to their equipment."
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