24/192 music downloads are silly

A couple minor corrections: XLR is just a connector, the equipment has to be balanced and there's plenty of equipment on the market with XLR jacks but unbalanced signals. Second, electromagnetic interference does not cause distortion, but it does cause noise.

Balanced signals are far from a magic bullet. It is basically a tool for solving a couple specific problems: interference and ground loops (NOT distortion). In a typical home setup, interference and ground loops will not be a problem, because we're just talking about plugging a CD into a stereo that's a few inches away, and they're both plugged into the same power strip. Balanced cables are more helpful if you have audio equipment plugged into different mains circuits, or drawing lots of current, or transmitting signals over long distances (more than 10 meters). For your home stereo, regular RCA cables are sufficient.

> this doesn't make a difference for compressed pop music but for uncompressed recordings of live performances with analog instruments or natural soundscapes it does.

I'm sorry, but this is just ridiculous. The noise floor of 16-bit PCM is -96 dB. Your living room, if it is very quiet, has an ambient noise level of 30 dB SPL. Or you could suppose that you spent money soundproofing your rooms, and you live out in the country, and it's as quiet as a professional recording studio, at 20 dB SPL. Now, turn up the CD player until the noise floor is audible. What happens when you play music? It will be at 110 dB SPL, which is the same sound level as sitting next to a chainsaw.

Now, the benefit of 24-bit audio is that you can play music louder than a chainsaw (> 110 dB SPL) and still have parts of the music that are quieter than a whisper (< 20 dB SPL). Even without compression, it is rare for actual live performances to have that kind of dynamic range. Pianos, for example, are simply not physically capable of it, with typical microphone technique.

Are you sure? I thought that was just a problem particular to early encoders for the Vorbis codec, which were alleviated by altering the tuning parameters of the encoder.

The first[1], the more theoretical of the two, is focused on digital communications where a Nyquist rate derived from the signal rate isn't enough to recover the signal function. The numerical examples given highlight recovering a sine wave from two, three, and six samples. The millions of samples in a single song might as well be infinite compared to these.

The second paper is much more practical and gives a number of real-world examples where naively applying Nyquist causes problems. The first, cutoff filters at half Nyquist to avoid aliasing, plauged many early CD players and other digital audio equipment. The second example is great as well, showing how understanding the signal being measured is important. The third example doesn't really apply to the subject at hand but is a good example of using aliasing for good. The fourth and fifth address the effect filters have on the signal. The sixth example refers to time response in control systems and minimizing phase delay to avoid oscillations.

[1]http://www.academia.edu/8412078/Is_The_Nyquist_Rate_Enough [2]http://www.wescottdesign.com/articles/Sampling/sampling.pdf

Audiophiles are an easy target. There are a lot that do stupid shit like buy $5000 power cables, expensive risers to lift cables off the ground, etc. A lot are pretentious, even if they're not insane or dumb.

But that's a rather inflammatory, and in my opinion, unfair position to take. I would probably be considered an audiophile - I have put quite a bit of money into audio equipment. But I love music. I listen to it basically constantly. It's one of my primary sources of entertainment - and I don't just mean 'I have music on when I do other shit.'

Each week I spend probably 20 hours doing nothing but relaxing with a bit to drink and some music on. Not reading, not surfing the net, not doing anything but closing my eyes and enjoying the sound. I'm listening to the music.

At times, yes, when I have been testing out new equipment before deciding if I want to buy it I go through and I do blind ABX tests with level matching. In this case, yes, I am listening to equipment. But this is a very minor portion of my total listening time.

I know you're probably not being totally serious with the post, but I do think it's a bit unfair towards those of us that love music, but also have invested time and money into getting a setup that sounds better for increased enjoyment.