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24/192 music downloads are silly

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Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#61

Post by TylerE »

masklinn wrote: post #30
errantspark wrote: post #18

I once spent ~2 hours explaining all of this (well maybe not all of it) to a friend of mine who was studying sound design at the time. He didn't believe me. I even transcoded some 24/192 FLAC Pink Floyd I had lying around and made him do a double blind test to show him that he'd prefer the slightly louder song every time, even if the louder song was 192kbps vs the FLAC. He did. He still doesn't believe me. He still t…

> Some people buy $500 wooden knobs to make their volume pots sound better. (or was that a hoax? i can't tell anymore) Some people buy small pyramids to elevate their cables off the floor, some people buy mats to put onto your CDs before putting the CD in a player ( http://dagogo.com/millenniums-m-cd-mat-carbon-cd-damper-revi... ), some people buy $1000+/meter digital interconnect cables ( http://www.theabsolutesound…

That's rather a wide-ranging bit of character assisination. Some of us just enjoy listing to music on decent equipment (If you can buy it at your local big box store, it's probably not sufficiently "decent") properly setup (which doesn't mean expensively - just basic proper speaker placement and the like).

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#62

Post by hamiltonkibbe »

diydsp wrote: post #41

I agree with the silliness of 192kHz, but not 24-bits. Here is why: In typical PCM recordings, like CDs, mid-range frequencies (e.g. 1kHz to 4kHz) are recorded with lower amplitudes because our ears are more sensitive to them. Sampling theory is correct and 16-bits can reproduce any waveform with ~100dB of range, however, in a complex waveform consisting of low, mid and high frequencies, the mid- and hi-range frequen…

The resolution of both sinusoids in the example you suggest is exactly 16bits

Edit: While it would be possible to represent each of those individual sinusoids in 6 and 10 bits individually, the signal you describe has the high frequency signal "riding on " the low frequency signal. you need 16 bits to represent the amplitude of that signal at e.g. t = pi/4.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#63

Post by TylerE »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #53
cthalupa wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>He still thinks he can hear the difference between FLAC and MP3 to this day. He works as a sound engineer now. It's really not fair to compare FLAC vs MP3 to "hi-rez" FLAC vs regular FLAC There's legitimately some instruments that do not compress well. The harpsichord is a particular example that you should be able to hear the difference on on any sort of decent equipment. Bur hi-rez vs regular flac is something tha…

What the heck is "hi-rez" FLAC? My understanding is that FLAC is lossless. How would you have varying degrees of lossless?

Greater than 44.1khz sampling rate and/or 16bit depth.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#64

Post by sillysaurus3 »

nkurz wrote: post #55

No one can see X-rays (or infrared, or ultraviolet, or microwaves). It doesn't matter how much a person believes he can. Retinas simply don't have the sensory hardware. The author seems to have stumbled into a poor example, as a recent study shows that humans can indeed see infrared light using an unexpected process. Should we read anything into the audio case from this? Probably not, but it's a sign that even those…

Openmindedness isn't the same thing as being open to accepting a mistaken belief. If no one can tell the difference between 24-bit and 16-bit, then 24-bit simply doesn't matter. The only way to know is with a controlled experiment that checks whether the people can detect no better than chance whether music is 24-bit.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#65

Post by TylerE »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #42
TylerE wrote: post #22

What's so funny is to see yet another occurrence of basically "because Nyquist" yet fails to address that Nyquist only holds true over infinite time. Over a window of any finite length perfect reproduction is NOT guaranteed. This paper, http://www.academia.edu/8412078/Is_The_Nyquist_Rate_Enough , for one, refutes this. More reading material: http://www.wescottdesign.com/articles/Sampling/sampling.pdf

Sure, but they're including a healthy margin by not caring about frequencies above 20KHz.

The margin isn't exactly healthy at 44.1khz. The video guys went with 48khz for a reason.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#66

Post by TTPrograms »

TylerE wrote: post #22

What's so funny is to see yet another occurrence of basically "because Nyquist" yet fails to address that Nyquist only holds true over infinite time. Over a window of any finite length perfect reproduction is NOT guaranteed. This paper, http://www.academia.edu/8412078/Is_The_Nyquist_Rate_Enough , for one, refutes this. More reading material: http://www.wescottdesign.com/articles/Sampling/sampling.pdf

If you just change your definition of basis functions from infinite sinusoids to truncated sinusoids and your definition of bandwidth to the maxiumum frequency of a nonzero truncated sinusoid coefficient you can recover an analog of Nyquist Rate just with a different idea of bandwidth. When you're talking about the typical 10^6 cycles over a song they're the same for all intents and purposes.

EDIT: Your truncated sinusoids have to be harmonics of the total signal length for this to work trivially.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#67

Post by TylerE »

reportingsjr wrote: post #38
jimon wrote: post #21

Ok, I have a 1k+$ of sound equipment, I listen to lossless, and my equipment is 24/192 DAC in hardware (so even if I pass 16/44.1, it will get up-converted). Now give me 24/192 music and don't tell me "you don't need it", because I need it. But for my mobile phone and 29$ earpods, 96 kbps 16/44.1 mp3 from soundcloud is good enough.

Uhhh, 16/44.1 can't be "upconverted" to 24/192. Once you lose that information is gone it is gone forever.

Dure, but there's no reason to expect you lose anything, either, barring implementation errors. Lots of the TV you watch looks fine, despite being a 720p signal displayed on a 1080p display. Same concept.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#68

Post by xkcd-sucks »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #60
diydsp wrote: post #41

I agree with the silliness of 192kHz, but not 24-bits. Here is why: In typical PCM recordings, like CDs, mid-range frequencies (e.g. 1kHz to 4kHz) are recorded with lower amplitudes because our ears are more sensitive to them. Sampling theory is correct and 16-bits can reproduce any waveform with ~100dB of range, however, in a complex waveform consisting of low, mid and high frequencies, the mid- and hi-range frequen…

The correct way to attack this isn't by attacking the theory. It's to gather a lot of people and ask them to press a button indicating whether the audio they hear is 16-bit or 24-bit. If the results are no better than chance, then 24-bit doesn't matter, regardless of how sound the underlying argument is. EDIT: The experiment would also be extremely difficult to design. For example, you'd need to run this test with mu…

If the results are no better than chance, it means the study methodology is flawed OR there's no effect.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#69

Post by ollysb »

errantspark wrote: post #18

I once spent ~2 hours explaining all of this (well maybe not all of it) to a friend of mine who was studying sound design at the time. He didn't believe me. I even transcoded some 24/192 FLAC Pink Floyd I had lying around and made him do a double blind test to show him that he'd prefer the slightly louder song every time, even if the louder song was 192kbps vs the FLAC. He did. He still doesn't believe me. He still t…

> He still thinks he can hear the difference between FLAC and MP3

If we're to take Tidal and Spotify(at highest quality) as representative of those two (please correct me if I'm wrong, no expert) then the difference is night and day. Perhaps Spotify could use a higher quality mp3 encoding?

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#70

Post by induscreep »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #53
cthalupa wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>He still thinks he can hear the difference between FLAC and MP3 to this day. He works as a sound engineer now. It's really not fair to compare FLAC vs MP3 to "hi-rez" FLAC vs regular FLAC There's legitimately some instruments that do not compress well. The harpsichord is a particular example that you should be able to hear the difference on on any sort of decent equipment. Bur hi-rez vs regular flac is something tha…

What the heck is "hi-rez" FLAC? My understanding is that FLAC is lossless. How would you have varying degrees of lossless?

24/192 flac as opposed to 16 bit flac. flac/mp3 is about compression, bits and khz are about sampling/representation.
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