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24/192 music downloads are silly

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Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#271

Post by plaguuuuuu »

rasz_pl wrote: post #234
storrgie wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

You are mixing two things. There is a difference between Intel charging you >$1K for a CPU that is 5% faster (in games) than overclocked $300 one versus scammer selling magical power cables (made by gypsy virgins in Romanian monastery on top of the highest mountain, in full moon) to some rich retards. $40,000 DAC? someone really went ahead and fabbed their own silicon (~$1mil for low volume run)? or did they maybe pi…

>Agile^^key'hole/RohdeShwartz multi gigahertz arbitrary waveform generators here

I don't even know what that is. But that's what I'm calling my next breakcore track.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#272

Post by retrogradeorbit »

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.

http://lavryengineering.com/pdfs/lavry-sampling-oversampling...

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#273

Post by [deleted] »

richardw wrote: post #261
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> God forbid you ever consider buying a Bose or Beats product. Meh, they're okay, but there are better choices out there. I've a pair of Sennheiser HD600 and it's one of those things that make you go "holy cow, all the hype is justified". And no, I'm not one of those folks who think gold-plated cables make a difference. Right now I'm listening to MP3 Internet radio on a pair of cheap behind the neck street cans.

A friend has had a set of these for ages. We found a difference between two source setups. A particular Sony DVD player sounded incredible - each note seemed perceptible in a 3D space [1]. A CD player he had, didn't. [2] We tried with Yamaha amp, without, different configs of widgets. That DVD player with nothing added was the best. He gave it to his sister and I haven't heard anything like that since. I nearly went…

[deleted]

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#274

Post by retrogradeorbit »

z3ugma wrote: post #4

I'm not familiar enough with the author's work to know if his credentials merit it, but to me his tone is unbelievably snobbish and offputting.

Not just his tone! Check out the self styled experts in these threads who despite never having been in a professional facility, nor actually tried the experiments themselves in such a facility, are none the less totally sure about what their outcome would be, and that anyone who disagrees is wrong.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#275

Post by mark-r »

The entire argument is based on the premise that the ear can't detect content above the limit of 20khz. While it is no doubt that few if any ears can hear independent tones above 20khz, what about detecting the shape of tones below that point? I don't think anybody's proven that the overtones of notes below 20khz are unimportant, or that the ear doesn't use edge detection for example to determine phase differences for location determination. These would require faithful reproduction beyond 20khz.

Also to clarify a technical point, sampling at 192khz doesn't extend the frequency response to 192khz, it only extends it to 96khz (Nyquist in action).

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#276

Post by marknutter »

cthalupa wrote: post #256
marknutter wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Interesting. I guess the main concept I'm exploring is the idea that if you don't control for the sound quality that the person mixing it (or more importantly, the person approving the mix) then it's hard to make any claims about how the sound was "meant to be heard".

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#277

Post by dietrichepp »

mxfh wrote: post #194
dietrichepp wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When possible go for XLR on the last mile to the speakers (good neutral studio speakers) to cancel out distortion from external electromagnetic pulses. 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. Balanc…

In a professional audio context XLR (as in RS-297-A) is pretty much equivalent with balanced audio, of cause this requires a balanced output and signal chain. Just as well as a stereo phono connector can be used for a balanced mono signal. You surely heard a GSM pulse on your speakers before; that's not just noise. Especially when living in an apartment where you can't control what kind of cold fusion reactor your ne…

In a professional context, XLR is not the same as balanced. I have several pieces of equipment with balanced connections, but only a minority of the balanced connections are XLR. Most are TRS.

I think you are using a different definition of "noise". "Noise" is unwanted sound.

The GSM noise you hear is caused by demodulation of GSM radio, in the 800-900 MHz range. At these frequencies, even a very small wire works well as an antenna. For example, an 8 cm wire makes a quarter-wave antenna. In my experience, there is often a trace of at least 8 cm within an amplifier or monitor which picks up the signal. In these cases, balanced connections do not help. The nonliniarities in semiconductor components then demodulates the GSM signal into the audio band. The worst offenders at picking up GSM interference are cheap amplifiers and radios. Good equipment is well shielded and doesn't suffer from radio interference, and in my experience, using unbalanced connections over short distances (1-2 meters) won't change that.

Balanced connections fix ground loops and let you run cables over long distances. That is all. They don't save you from GSM demodulation.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#278

Post by lobster_johnson »

Wicher wrote: post #131
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…

> 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…

CD-audio "Red Book" data does have error correction (Cross-Interleaved Reed-Solomon Code). Whether you get a bit-perfect audio rip depends on how much error correction and retrying you do.

I remember experimenting with writing a CD ripping program in the 90s, using Windows APIs, and I found, like you, that I got different data each time. But modern rippers such as EAC does this stuff much better and will for the most part give you bit-perfect rips.

That mat does nothing. And if you read that linked page, you will see that he claims it drastically improves audio quality (bass, etc.), which is pure nonsense.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#279

Post by SomeCallMeTim »

kazinator wrote: post #267
cthalupa wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bose and beats* are by, every /objective/ measure, shitty products. Subjectively, you might like them, but the faithfulness of audio reproduction is not a subjective matter. You can play a tone and measure how well that tone is actually played back. You can then also objectively compare things that produce that playback quality at various price points and figure out if they're priced competitively. There is plenty of…

Bose knows how to coax a bass note or two out of a small plastic box.

Bose knows marketing.

I've got excellent bookshelf speakers that were cheaper than the equivalent from Bose, but the reviews and tests showed them to be way better.

My (small!) speakers end up producing way too much bass for the room they're in, in fact, and I use Foobar 2000 with the "MathAudio Room EQ" plug-in to get a flatter speaker response from them. But their problem isn't that they can't produce bass notes.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#280

Post by tsotha »

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…

>Self-styled audiophiles are, by and large, idiots with way too much money plagued by magical thinking.

I agree on the "plagued by magical thinking" part, but not all these people are idiots. Some of them are quite intelligent, in fact. I think they just want to be "in the know", and are able to suspend their normal skepticism in order to belong.

One of the smartest and most productive programmers I ever met was taken in by this nonsense. He replaced all the metal bolts in his power supply with teflon because the metal bolts disrupt the magnetic field around the transformer and you can hear that, maaaan!

He did have a nice sounding system, for which he spent about $10k more than one that would have sounded the same.

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