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24/192 music downloads are silly

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Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#291

Post by throwketchup »

plaguuuuuu wrote: post #271
rasz_pl wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

HP was known for building generally good test equipment, including arbitrary waveform generators. Op is humorously referring to the fact that the test and measurement division was spun off first as Agilent, then Keysight (seriously?), and probably something else by tomorrow (marketing is furiously brainstorming new meaningless names. They only need to merge with Danaheer and rename themselves Flukeronix for the circle of life to be complete.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#292

Post by [deleted] »

storrgie wrote: post #249
rasz_pl wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It costs a good deal to make a discrete R2R ladder dac instead of buying a chip from TI ( http://www.msbtech.com/products/dac4.php ), however I've now seen some cool DIY projects that are doing even this on the cheap: http://www.diyaudio.com/forums/vendors-bazaar/259488-referen...

[deleted]

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#293

Post by vegedor »

retrogradeorbit wrote: post #269
badsock wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for posting that! However, it's worth point out that that study has its detractors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_effect I find the intermodulation argument a convincing one - it's hard to not have it affect the test, and if they haven't taken specific steps to avoid it then it would be easy to join a large amount of tests that have fallen prey to it. I note, however, that Wikipedia doesn't mention a…

What gets me about the intermodulation effect is that some people want to have it both ways. They are so stuck in the 'there is no difference' camp they fail to see the self contradiction in the argument. On one hand, higher frequencies above 20KHz can't be heard at all, so there's no point having them! You can't hear them! Then on the other hand, higher frequencies above 20kHz affect the audible region of the sound…

Don't deal with what if! The dominant notion is that of the inability to hear a sound of frequency higher than X. Your question leads to other interesting questions, like how is the frequency of a tone defined for a point in time (much like it's not intuitive to derive velocity). To be honest, I don't know either, but I'd bid two cents that ear and brain don't compare well to the devices we record music with.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#294

Post by cnvogel »

cjensen wrote: post #206

The author confuses sampling theory with reality. Sampling theory says you can reconstruct a signal by sampling it at least twice per cycle. So 44.1KHz is an adequate sampling rate for an 22.05Khz signal. Unfortunately to make Digital-to-Analog conversion work according to theory, you must first construct an ideal analog filter which filters out everything above 22.05Khz while leaving everything less than 22.05Khz un…

You are overestimating the jitter problem by a large amount. The first S/PDIF receiver IC I find via google (CS8416) claims to have an output jitter of typ. 200ps on the clock output, running from its internal PLL synced to an externally supplied S/PDIF input.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#295

Post by maaku »

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…

Interesting. I'll have to check those projects out. I have the same problem as the GP -- I have a script that rips CDs, taking multiple reads until it gets two bit-for-bit identical copies. And just about every time at least one track is silently "corrupted."

(I put the scare quotes on because I haven't actually bothered to check if there is an audible difference. But it does confirm the GP's experience.)

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#296

Post by retrogradeorbit »

ChrisGranger wrote: post #288
retrogradeorbit wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've completely misunderstood the article. It's discussing differences in the the PCM sampling rate, not the MP3 encoding bitrate. Or in otherwords, all these samples they compare are FLAC. 192 KHz has nothing to do with 192 kbps. I'm one of those audio engineers who mistakenly thinks I can tell between an MP3 and a FLAC. Yet somehow I understand the difference between sample rate and encoding bitrate, and you do n…

Bit depth affects dynamic range, and that's it. The only thing a 24-bit sample can do better than a 16-bit sample is accurately reproduce the difference between very loud sounds and very quiet ones. That's all. For the vast, vast majority of music listeners, the difference will be insignificant, as they don't listen in an environment where a dynamic range of 144 dB can be used to anywhere near its full effect.

Yes. And 16 bit cannot by itself represent without distortion the full dynamic range of a lot of music. Most samples, most of the time, do not use a full 16 bits. This is why during CD mastering dithering is used.

Take it from me, when you master 24 bit stereo tracks, and you don't dither, huge amounts of low level detail disappear. The detail in the quiets is there in 24 bit, and lost when its truncated to 16 bits. Add the dithering, and you get increased noise, but the detail comes back.

One could suggest that with dithering 16 bits can represent it. But that's with a whole bunch of noise added to the signal. You can argue that noise is not audible, but it is _just_, and when mastering you can audition the different dither spectrums to find which dither least impacts the music.

http://www.digido.com/articles-and-demos12/13-bob-katz/16-di...

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#297

Post by retrogradeorbit »

ChrisGranger wrote: post #290
retrogradeorbit wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've completely misunderstood the article. It's discussing differences in the the PCM sampling rate, not the MP3 encoding bitrate. Or in otherwords, all these samples they compare are FLAC. 192 KHz has nothing to do with 192 kbps. I'm one of those audio engineers who mistakenly thinks I can tell between an MP3 and a FLAC. Yet somehow I understand the difference between sample rate and encoding bitrate, and you do n…

I think you're misreading what the OP said. He wasn't making the mistake of associating 192 kbps with 192 kHz. It was just a coincidence that he used 192 kbps MP3 transcodes. He could just as easily have used 224 kbps MP3s versus 24/192 FLACs in the test he described. The point was that his friend couldn't tell the difference between MP3s and FLACs.

Fair enough. Then the OP comment is completely off topic. What has encoding bitrates got to do with the original article?

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#298

Post by ansgri »

tempestn wrote: post #175
anigbrowl wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are low-budget audiophile products, ie they are still marketed mainly to boost the ego of purchasers. There are three brands of headphones that pros use: Beyerdynamic (typically DT-100 or DT-770), Sennheiser (typically HD-5/650) and Sony (typically MDR-7506/9). Beyerdynamics have somewhat better isolation so they're more popular in music studios, Sonys are more comfortable when you have to wear them all day so…

From all the reviews I've seen, Bose noise-cancelling headphones are pretty much the best you can buy. Especially if you want earbuds (the QC20s). They're extremely expensive though. Do you (or anyone) have suggestions for alternatives?

I use Klipsch x7i and they allow you to listen to audiobooks on a low volume setting in an underground train. Which, in Moscow, seems like a perfection.

The sound is very clear, but not balanced. Neither an expert nor a musician though.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#299

Post by ClashTheBunny »

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…

Wouldn't most of the digital cable costs be due to analog interference in the machines they are connecting and them acting like antennas and not that the signal is corrupted on the way?

Unless it's an insulator (like fiber optic cables), you are hooking both a 50 foot antenna and a digital transmission line to your box; if you want just the digital transmission line, you have to insulate the hell out of the antenna part of it.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#300

Post by dzhiurgis »

I am sorry, but the authors' examples and parallels doesn't make much sense to me.

First of all, what does sample rate has even remotely to do with hearing range?

If we are comparing this to visual information, perhaps it would be best to draw parallels with video. Namely, sample rate would be equal to frames per second and bit depth to colour depth. In both areas we are still seeing improvements from TV manufacturers (100Hz TVs) and gamers are still racing to get better fps so it looks more realistic.

The question then would be, why 25 fps is the minimum average human can withstand? What are the limits here and can it look more realistic for certain people with more frames per second.

After all, this race for fidelity is just attempt to get more accurate representation of analog sound, which opens different problem - absolute all of todays music is electronic - produced from samples and samples above 44KHz are simply not available. You may find some vinyl rips of more classical music (which does explain the phenomenon why so many rock stars would start listening to classic music - after getting rich and dumping money into expensive sound systems they'd discover elegance beyond distortion).

Saying all this fidelity does not matter is kind of equivalent of throwing away all the vinyls (although transistors play a role here too).

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