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24/192 music downloads are silly

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Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#321

Post by ferongr »

alkonaut wrote: post #314
ferongr wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 24bit digital format doesn't mean the DAC actually has 24bit of SNR. Hell, most DACs in computers, phones and the like struggle with producing 16 bits. Not to mention that even if you had that headroom, when approaching the threshold of hearing would mean that you wouldn't be able to tell a difference at lower volumes.

assuming a signal is played at "normal" listening volume after first being attenuated by 1/8 digitally (samples shifted 3bits down) and then passed through a high quality dac and amplified, are you saying the difference between 16 and 24 bit streams would be inaudible or nearly so? That to me sounds surprising. That seems to imply that the difference to playing the 16 bit stream unscaled (No digital attenuation and 8…

Well, depending on the gain of the monitors, it will not matter With low enough gain you will have enough headroom, with high gain you run into hissing from the source. At a high gain the hissing from the DAC's noisefloor will be dominant, making the loss of bits a thing of minor conern. In any case, with powered monitors you need an analog volume control at the end of the chain, that's the correct practice if you care about quality.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#322

Post by makomk »

Wicher wrote: post #157
aidenn0 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a decent drive, cdparanoia should successfully rip with no errors on a clean disc. I have done the md5sum test before.

Background here: http://www.xiph.org/paranoia/faq.html#play

It's generally the lack of synchronization and positioning information compared to data CDs that gets you. In particular, on many older drives you can't reliably start the rip at the same place each time, so even if all the corrections and fixups work perfectly and you get a bit-exact rip (which isn't hard) you still won't get the same file twice.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#323

Post by raverbashing »

tinco wrote: post #211
tempestn wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For the price of Bose noise-cancelling headphones you can get headphones from the three brands the parent mentioned (throw in AKG for good measure) that sound better in 'lab conditions'. But if your discerning feature is 'noise-cancelling', i.e. headphones that sound excellent in noisy environments like trains, coffeeshops or open work environments I believe Bose is the king and will be as long as their patents are e…

I had an in-ear Noise Cancelling Philips, that's around $20

And for heavy noise cancelling goals it was very good (like, being able to work with someone with a lawnmower or a drill next to you)

Granted, half of the noise isolation is passive, half active, still, very good

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#324

Post by dzhiurgis »

wander_homer wrote: post #305
dzhiurgis wrote: post #300

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 manufacturer…

"First of all, what does sample rate has even remotely to do with hearing range?" The sample rate (among a few other things like the quality of the low-pass filter) determines what's the highest frequency you can perfectly read from a signal. Since most human beings can't hear frequencies above 20 kHz you simply need to choose a sample rate that can represent a 20 kHz signal perfectly and that's something like 44 or…

Ok that does make sense and indeed defines overall distortion. Moreover, what his video shows is example with single tone, while reality is that single instrument would produce multitude tones and typical track would employ multiple instruments.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#325

Post by Anthony-G »

pierrec wrote: post #36
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…

Wait until he gets some of'em Shakti Stones! [1] One reviewer [2] notes: " The effect of the first few Shakti products was not as apparent as when the effect became compounded. Each built on the others' ability to eliminate EMI in the component on or under which it was placed. Music became more relaxed, with greater clarity. Space and ambience increased. The soundfield became considerably more open and defined. At a…

A perfect example of Poe's law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#326

Post by treerock »

Aren't there benefits other than listening quality to having the music available in this format? Imagine 200 years from now, finding an old, lost stash of music in the attic. What would you prefer, a bunch of CDs or some drives with 24/192 FLACs on them?

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#327

Post by yyyy-mm-dd »

corysama wrote: post #14

Anyone here who has not already seen Xiph's Digital Show and Tell ( http://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml ) should do themselves a favor and sit down for a watch. It makes sense of a lot of mysteries and misconceptions around digital audio.

So I watched, and I'm confused. How exactly does DAC recreate a band limited signal without having an infinite lookahead? Honest question. Any pointers?

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#329

Post by Intermernet »

yyyy-mm-dd wrote: post #327
corysama wrote: post #14

Anyone here who has not already seen Xiph's Digital Show and Tell ( http://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml ) should do themselves a favor and sit down for a watch. It makes sense of a lot of mysteries and misconceptions around digital audio.

So I watched, and I'm confused. How exactly does DAC recreate a band limited signal without having an infinite lookahead? Honest question. Any pointers?

Have a look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whittaker%E2%80%93Shannon_inter... .

"The Whittaker–Shannon interpolation formula or sinc interpolation is a method to construct a continuous-time bandlimited function from a sequence of real numbers."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconstruction_filter has a less mathematical explanation, but, as Monty mentions in the video, be wary of the sentence "in practice, the output of a DAC is more typically a zero-order hold series of stairsteps". This really only applies to some (mostly low-end) DACs. There are many DACs that will use anti-aliasing / interpolation and probably many other methods to recreate the signal.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#330

Post by Intermernet »

Htsthbjig wrote: post #318

I have worked a lot with audio programming and while most of the article is right in what is known, it could be wrong at what we don't know. Technical myopia(you see too much of what you know but you don't see the big picture). We are using HDR in pictures even when the eye could not differentiate between HDR colors because it adapts to the general luminosity of the image but CAUTION the general luminosity level affe…

Not disagreeing with you, but one of the main reasons for using HDR in film is comparable to using 192/24 (or even 192/32) in audio. It provides greater dynamic range for post-processing.

The final "rendered" product will usually still be at normal dynamic range for film, and 44.1/16 (or 48/16) for audio.

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