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24/192 music downloads are silly

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Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#251

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

harshreality wrote: post #222
nkurz wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I probably should have written 16/44.1 vs 24/192, since I was thinking mostly of the waveform 'beat' interactions as shown in the linked video. Do you feel those are also indistinguishable? I can't afford an actual bet on it, but I'm interested enough to explore a bit and see what I can find.

Unless your listener can hear frequencies above 22.05kHz, it's theoretically impossible because the sampling theorem says 44.1kHz sampling can perfectly reproduce all frequencies below 22.05kHz. Any differences within normal human audible frequency ranges must be caused by imperfect DAC. Agreed? (No, I don't have a perfect DAC, but if the audible artifacts are because of a DAC that produces less perfect analog wavefo…

Do you have a perfect DAC we can use as a reference?

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#252

Post by aidenn0 »

anigbrowl wrote: post #208
aidenn0 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's different between the $80 7506 and $200 7509?

Slightly larger driver, slightly heavier, supposedly has a greatly-extended frequency range of 5Hz - 80 KHz vs 10hz - 20Khz in the 7506. Of course your typical D/A converter won't even render such low frequencies due to DC coupling, and if they were there you'd want to EQ them away pronto as they would eat all your headroom. While I continue to enjoy excellent high-frequency hearing even in my mid 40s (to my surprise…

thanks for the info; I'm considering upgrading my office headphones (I've got some random $20 over-the-ear pair right now). $80 is certainly reasonable, and I prefer transparent speakers in general.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#253

Post by Stratoscope »

Lazlo_Nibble wrote: post #228
Wicher wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some people buy mats to put onto your CDs before putting the CD in a player An 80-minute, 700 MB CD-R fits 80 * 60 * 44100 * 2 * 2 / 2^20 ~= 807 MB of audio. Why is that? The 100MB difference is not just due to the audio TOC being of smaller size than the ISO9660 or UDF file system metadata. It's also because of differences in error correction. I don't have the spec on hand but I recall from when I was investigatin…

Uh, no. Bit-perfect ripping is trivial and routine, and tools like the AccurateRip DB (which has checksums for around three million different titles you can use to verify the checksums on your own rips) and the CUEtools database (which has recovery records you can use to correct bit errors on your own rips) prove it. I routinely get bit-accurate single-pass high-speed rips--no "paranoid" settings or re-reads--of disc…

Oh sure, your rips may be perfect at the bit level, but how do you know that they're free of sub-bit quantization that isn't detectable by electronic circuits but can be heard by the human ear?

This sub-bit jitter and interference can travel along with a digital file and sneak right past your ordinary bit-level error detection and correction, no matter how lossless you make it. That's because these errors aren't visible in the bits. They occur at a deeper and more subtle level, in between the bits.

Even if you prove mathematically that two files contain the exact same bits, you can't prove that the human ear won't hear any difference, can you?

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#254

Post by storrgie »

storrgie wrote: post #218
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…

When someone spends money on something in a silly way, do you consider them to be an idiot? Would you make the same statement about someone who spends 200$ on a bottle of scotch versus buying a 35$ bottle? Let the 'idiots' spend their money driving an industry that is combining the creation of electronics with functional art. I'm not sad to see a $40,000 DAC. I don't have to buy it, and it's cool to know someone buil…

This article makes points better than I did with my post: http://www.johngineer.com/blog/?p=1741

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#255

Post by badsock »

leoc wrote: post #171
badsock wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The increase in sample rate to 192kHz only allows frequencies above 22KHz to be represented (i.e. no effect whatsoever on the low frequencies that you mention). Pushing the bits to 24 only lowers the noise levels (which at 16 are already demonstrably imperceptible). What you mention, though, points directly to what /will/ improve the quality of sound reproduction: speakers. It gets harder and harder to move that much…

According to this interesting-looking article here http://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/07/02/feature_the_future_l... the problem isn't frequency response but things like time delay, and it's not due simply to the very end but also to systems leading up to and around it like inaccurate crossovers and speaker cabinets that introduce time delay.

Agreed - my definition of "the end" being anything past the far end of the speaker cable.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#256

Post by cthalupa »

marknutter wrote: post #240
cthalupa wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, uh, we can measure the frequency response made by headphones. http://www.innerfidelity.com/content/headphone-measurement-p... http://www.headphone.com/pages/evaluating-headphones This is a pretty scientific matter - when I say "the purpose is to reproduce the input sound", we can tell exactly what is supposed to be reproduced, and we can tell exactly how capable the speaker is of reproducing it. Some exceptions h…

> This is a pretty scientific matter - when I say "the purpose is to reproduce the input sound", we can tell exactly what is supposed to be reproduced, and we can tell exactly how capable the speaker is of reproducing it. You are assuming the song was mixed by someone wearing headphones that perfectly reproduce the input sound. Suppose the person who mixed a song was using beats headphones or other headphones that au…

So, headphone use in studios is not generally for creating the final mix. Monitor speakers are used nearly exclusively in professional studios as what you are mixing for. Headphones have multiple places in the production process where they are used, but they're not the final target.

There's a few reasons for this. The most pragmatic is that doing so will produce the track that sounds the best on the widest variety of setups - EQed or not. There's also not any single headphone out there that is used so predominately that it would make sense to cater to it in specific. The closest might be apple earbuds, but people using those probably aren't too concerned about sound quality anyway, so it doesn't make sense to mix with those in mind either.

From a theoretical standpoint, you're not necessarily wrong, but it's just not how things currently work, and there's not really any reason why it ever would work that way in a professional studio.

I make no claim as to what the people making music exclusively in their bedroom are doing, though.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#257

Post by storrgie »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #64
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.

I think the main argument was that 192Khz sampling does not matter, where as 24-bit can provide some benefit (albiet might be in your ability to implement filters).

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#258

Post by richardw »

lucaspiller wrote: post #205
wodenokoto wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are Beats shitty or just expensive? How little would I have to pay to get same quality? I am finding it hard to believe that they are actually shitty, while I find it very easy to believe that they are way overpriced. I have never listened to Beats headphones but I imagine they have a lot of base-boost (based on absolutely nothing), but that is not the same as shitty.

Given whenever I stand near someone on a train with them I can hear a fair amount of their music (not anywhere near as bad as Apple earbuds though), I assume they can't be that great - that or the listener has very bad hearing. I have a set of Sennheiser HD 202 which don't have anywhere near the same leakage and cost £35. I haven't tried Beats so can't say much about audio quality, but in my experience high leakage u…

Leakage is sometimes intended so it's not necessarily an indicator of quality. See the HD800's. You'll hear them in any open-plan office, for sure. There's no attempt to keep the music from leaking, their only priority is sound quality (which is, at this price, a matter of taste and preference).

http://en-us.sennheiser.com/dynamic-headphones-high-end-arou...

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#260

Post by [deleted] »

anigbrowl wrote: post #208
aidenn0 wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's different between the $80 7506 and $200 7509?

Slightly larger driver, slightly heavier, supposedly has a greatly-extended frequency range of 5Hz - 80 KHz vs 10hz - 20Khz in the 7506. Of course your typical D/A converter won't even render such low frequencies due to DC coupling, and if they were there you'd want to EQ them away pronto as they would eat all your headroom. While I continue to enjoy excellent high-frequency hearing even in my mid 40s (to my surprise…

[deleted]
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