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24/192 music downloads are silly

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Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#101

Post by justatdotin »

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, then it remains possible that a small subset of the test group actually can appreciate an improvement. Content providers may like to cater for that small subset. disclaimer: I am not in that hypothetical subset.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#102

Post by murki »

nnnnni wrote: post #54
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…

There's also the fact that you can FEEL some sounds that you can't hear. Chris Randall of Sister Machine Gun (at least used to?) use a low-frequency generator at live shows to produce a sound that the audience could feel but not hear in order to make the music more intense. I suspect that you'd gain some of that effect with a larger bit size. ...or I could be completely wrong. Whatever.

The entire sub-bass genre is based around that concept. Case in point James Blake https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOT2-OTebx0&hd=1

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#103

Post by TylerE »

bch wrote: post #74
TylerE wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

> Some of us just enjoy list[en]ing to music on decent equipment The best definition of audiophile I've heard is somebody who listens to equipment, rather than music. Of course your favourite Pink Floyd sounds better on a decent stereo rather than a clock-radio, but if somebody is forever chasing the proper "colour" for their speakers, or swapping amps for the perfect tone... they might be an audiophile. edit: s/you…

You're using "audiophile" as if it only represents say , the 5% most wacky partipants in the hobby.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#104

Post by KeytarHero »

24/192 playback isn't entirely silly. It's probably true that you can't hear a difference between a perfectly reconstructed 16/44.1k audio and perfectly reconstructed 24/192k audio. But the quality of your DAC certainly does matter, as well as the analog hardware that's after it. If a device has a 24/192k DAC, it means the manufacturer didn't just use the cheapest DAC they could find, and it's more likely to be high-quality (plus, it shows they care about audio quality, so they may have gone for a higher-quality analog hardware too).

In a perfect world, cell phone and music player manufacturers would advertise "this phone has a Wolfson DAC and uses OPA2134 opamps running at 9V in the output stage". But the mass consumer market doesn't care about those things, so for now all we have to go off is "this one supports 24/192 so it's probably got better hardware" (or the alternative, "this one says it has Beats Audio so it's probably got hyped bass and is terribly inaccurate").

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#105

Post by tedunangst »

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.

Well... There are a great many (infinite, really) possible input signals that will all generate the same 16/44 recording, but some of those inputs are more likely than others. You could simulate the likeliest and "record" it at 24/192.

It's also "impossible" to upscale an image, but the difference between bilinear and bicubic and sinc upscaling is readily apparent.

This of course assumes that the listener is capable of discerning 24/192 sound.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#106

Post by janussi »

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…

You can't hear the difference between MP3 and FLAC? I'm sorry but either you're deaf or your equipment is very poor. Bad example.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#107

Post by largote »

threeseed wrote: post #78
masklinn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Self-styled audiophiles are, by and large, idiots with way too much money plagued by magical thinking. Not just that. But the arrogance and fanboyism is rampant. God forbid you ever consider buying a Bose or Beats product.

Well, Bose / Beats are clearly overpriced for what they deliver.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#108

Post by astrange »

alkonaut wrote: post #89

24bit absolutely makes sense in the age of streaming devices pushing sound to digital inputs on powered speakers. Simply for convenience reasons I want to adjust the playback volume already at my phone. I have no analog volume control (or rather, it's a configuration knob you set up once) If you play back a sample at 1/8 the volume, you still have 21bits of range from a 24bit sample. Playing a 16bit sample at 1/8 vol…

You might want a high bit depth audio stream if you were seriously boosting the volume, but not if you were lowering it. At most you might want a 24bit DAC.

And if you can't pass an ABX test, then you don't really want it. Can you?

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#109

Post by bsaul »

I'm clearly not qualified in biology and DSP to argue with the 24/192 argument (although i am one of those guys that will swear that it definitely sounds better, having tried one), but here's another thing to consider :

- Since the 2000's the general trend with music has been to compress audio as much as possible to send it through the pipe and store it everywhere, assuming availability was a superior concern than quality.

Therefore, the audio industry in general has been totally collapsing, in favor of the network provider business and now cloud storage one.

- We audiophile, have been thus pushed during the last decade to listen to shite mp3 on our phones, to get poor audio resolution on our cable TV, and often cry at those "boom bass" headphones and speakers advertised as being the bests.

In this context, this new trend to high fidelity audio for everyone is simply a miracle. Maybe we will finally see lossless audio everywhere. Maybe we will get 4 or 5 channels audio file formats (i have fond memories of a choir song demo included with my soundblaster audigy which put you in the middle of the choir). Maybe all of this just means the world is ready to jump to high-res audio hardware before 4K video becomes mainstream...

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#110

Post by astrange »

protomyth wrote: post #77
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…

Wasn't a cello (I keep remembering hearing "cello attack") supposed to be problematic on mp3?

MP3 has specific algorithmic weaknesses above 16khz[0] which even the highest legal bitrate can't cover up… sometimes. It's actually easiest to hear it with cymbals, or the old LAME sample "fatboy".

You can just not use MP3 though. It's 2014! Use AAC!

[0] http://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=LAME_Y_switch

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