Earlier quoted context omitted.
Flawless satire.
Something about it being on HN also makes you assume a post isn't a joke starting out so I read for a lot longer before I realized what was happening.
That's also between the bits. See?
24/192 music downloads are silly
341–350 of 443 posts
Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 visi…
The decoder/player doesn't know how to read between the bits. Same file -> same playback. If you hear the same sound file twice (or two identical files) and hear something different, you software is broken or you're imagining things.
Whooosh.
Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly
#343I 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…
$130 USB cable, with 8 non-ironic/satirical reviews: http://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-Carbon-75m-2-5-Cable/produc...
(Also, the reviews on this $15,000 speaker cable are amazing: http://www.amazon.com/AudioQuest-Terminated-Speaker-Cable-Di... )
Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly
#344I 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…
Well, you might be surprised on Apple's Store page - esp. the accessories section. Or you like that?
Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly
#345So I appreciate everyone's point of view and applaud using an empirical approach, for those of you who share the author's point of view, but I disagree unfortunately. For those of us who have worked in DSP, either using it or implementing new things with it, there's s highly mathematical reason to record the source of you audio with a higher sample rate than what the author suggests is a generous maximum.
It has to do with waveforms and how continuous they are. So, for starters, true, if you have a perfectly continuous wave form, at 22K, then your sample rate must be at least 44K. In fact, with sample rate of 44k you can perfectly discretize a continuous wave form, like a sine wave.
Does you see the problem with this? Sounds are not always continuous! If you look at the waveform of a violin, distorted guitar, cymbal, etc... They're very jagged. To effectively approximate these analog waveforms as a finite set of sums you need a much higher sample rate. It makes s HUGE difference, trust me.
So basically, technically speaking, 44K works just five if you only listen to music made by orjan pipes and penny whistles, but most sounds are very complicated, and to be properly captured you actually need a higher sample rate. It's simple and mathematical. Also, this whole "44.1K is all you need and if you don't agree with me then you're dumb and don't understand math" ra ra ra has been going on all over the Internet for ages, and while u appreciate the motivations that people may have, it gets a little annoying. Basically, instead of immediately jumping to the conclusion that people's ears are wrong, maybe the more patient and mindful approach is to ask oneself, "why does my mathematical knowledge of a subject fall short of explaining what many people seem to experience?".
Note: everything I said was regarding the source of capturing a sound. There's an entire science behind compression and all that sauce.
Also Stanford's DSP lectures (available online) explain this much more indepth, albeit abstractly.
Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly
#346So I appreciate everyone's point of view and applaud using an empirical approach, for those of you who share the author's point of view, but I disagree unfortunately. For those of us who have worked in DSP, either using it or implementing new things with it, there's s highly mathematical reason to record the source of you audio with a higher sample rate than what the author suggests is a generous maximum. It has to d…
> It makes s HUGE difference, trust me.
The articles entire point is that statements like this cannot be trusted. Read under "Listening tests", and it's clear that there is no benefit to the higher samling rate. I highly encourage you to do your own double blind ABX - if you can select 10 tracks where people can reliabilly tell the 44K from the 192K I will reconsider. But until then, everything we know so far tells us that 44KHz is more than enough.
Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly
#347I 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…
In my personal testing a few years ago, I couldn't tell the difference between source and 192kbps MP3s either.
I still rip CDs to FLAC but only to transcode them to lossy formats for later listening. I do this in case I decide to switch lossy formats in the future (note: due to differences in psychoacoustical models, you should never transcode from one lossy format to another).
Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly
#348Earlier 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?
tomc1985: hope you see this - your account has been hellbanned for over two years (about 850 days, with one comment visible 270 days ago - not sure how that happened).
Your comments over those years don't seem bad at all - sometimes perhaps a little confrontational but not aggressively so. Perhaps HN could allow users above a certain karma threshold vote on [dead] posts, with those scores going towards a "repeal fund" - make decent comments over a certain period and get temporarily un-banned.
Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly
#349So I appreciate everyone's point of view and applaud using an empirical approach, for those of you who share the author's point of view, but I disagree unfortunately. For those of us who have worked in DSP, either using it or implementing new things with it, there's s highly mathematical reason to record the source of you audio with a higher sample rate than what the author suggests is a generous maximum. It has to d…
"everything I said was regarding the source of capturing a sound"
Well, the rant is about reproduction of the sound. For capturing sound he basically agrees with you, 24/192 has its place in studio, recording and music production.
Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly
#350So I appreciate everyone's point of view and applaud using an empirical approach, for those of you who share the author's point of view, but I disagree unfortunately. For those of us who have worked in DSP, either using it or implementing new things with it, there's s highly mathematical reason to record the source of you audio with a higher sample rate than what the author suggests is a generous maximum. It has to d…
As a former recording engineer, I completely agree that there's value in capturing audio at better than 16/44.1. 24-bit means I don't have to care so much about "filling up the bit bucket" when I set input levels because I have a lower noise floor. And if I'm doing any DSP, obviously I like having more information rather than less.
But I'm not at all convinced that distributing recordings at better than 16/44.1 has any real benefit. I've done some blind tests before and was never able to reliably beat 50/50 on figuring out which tracks were "higher quality" - and while I certainly don't have the best ears on the planet, I feel pretty confident that my hearing is more developed than the average person. Not to mention the fact that probably 90%+ of consumers are listening on systems with poor speakers and worse DACs.
I often hear audio people explain why music should be distributed at higher bit and sampling rates, but I have yet to see anyone who can reliably tell the difference - especially on a consumer-grade system.
Edit: Downvotes, really? Was there something objectionable in there?