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24/192 music downloads are silly

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Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#371

Post by sp332 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #33
sp332 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He founded xiph.org, created the Ogg container, and helped write Vorbis and Daala. His creds are pretty much the best. Edit: For a less-snobbish presentation, try watching his Digital Show & Tell video https://www.xiph.org/video/

I wouldn't say being a data compression geek makes anyone a master of DSP or of psychoacoustics. The basic issue with 16-bit is that low level details like reverb tails and hall ambiences or very quiet musical passages get the equivalent of 14-bit (f) 12-bit (mf) to 8-bit (ppp) sampling. This sounds noticeably grainy and digital. It's not about total dynamic range or sine waves, it's about the fact that human ears ca…

After thinking about this for a while, I think I might have identified your specific problem: you're playing the music back louder than it was recorded. It's possible to amplify quiet sounds until you can hear the quantization noise, but it's also possible to turn the volume down until you can't hear the noise. And at that point, there is plenty of dynamic range in 16 bits to take you all the way to the threshold of pain, so you're not losing out on the high end either. Of course it's possible that the recording was made very quiet, so you have to crank it up to listen to it. But that's a problem with the mastering, not an inherent limitation of the 16-bit format.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#372

Post by joshuacc »

mhurron wrote: post #363
tsotha wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 take…

> not all these people are idiots. Some of them are quite intelligent You can be very intelligent in one domain and be a complete idiot in every other domain. The result ends up being unless we're talking about that one domain, they're an idiot.

I would refer to that as knowledgeable and ignorant rather than intelligent and idiotic. It doesn't really make sense to say that Gary Kasparov is an idiot regarding the construction of log cabins. Rather, he is an intelligent person who is ignorant of the construction of log cabins.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#373

Post by retrogradeorbit »

ChrisGranger wrote: post #365
retrogradeorbit wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

I certainly won't argue that 16-bit is just as good as 24-bit from an objective standpoint, as 24-bit is obviously superior, full stop. I'm just saying that for most listeners (everyone except those who listen at high levels in dedicated, treated listening rooms in very quiet environments) the difference will be inaudible almost all the time. Extremely low level detail doesn't really matter if it's lost in the >20 dB…

Yes. I completely agree. From my perspective, even if one person in a hundred can hear a difference, then I'm going to pay attention. I don't want to boil everything down to meet the average. I think it's fine to release 16/44. I think well produced music sounds excellent in that format. It's one of the reasons the CD has done so well. It's just hifi enough to capture everything. And it's amazing to think this technology had its début in 1982!

But for so long, for those of us who want a higher quality (hearing it exactly as they would have heard in the studio during the production) there was nothing we could do. Willing to pay more for it, doesn't matter. You just can't get it. It's still that way.

What gripes me is the attitude of many, including this xiph article, that hires versions "make no sense", that "there is no point" and thus everyone should just be happy with what they've got and that anyone protesting is an "audiophool" or believes in magic fairies or something. We all get lumped in with those people buying $3000 IEC power cables. For many people it's all black and white, there is no room for grey. You either think that 128kbps mp3s sound identical to the analogue master tape, or you are a fool spending $20,000 on magical stickers to increase the light speed in your CD player.

All I want is to be able to buy the mix and hear it as the engineer heard it in the studio. That would be nice. I know it's not for everyone, but it doesn't make me crazy.

As food for thought, have a read of what Rupert Neve said about Geoff Emerick's hearing ability (being able to discern a 3dB rise at 54kHz) here: http://poonshead.com/Reading/Articles.aspx

"The danger here is that the more qualified you are, the more you 'know' that something can't be true, so you don't believe it. Or you 'know' a design can't be done, so you don't try it."

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#374

Post by sp332 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #238
sp332 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you mean about quieter sounds having less resolution. The point of having a 16-bit representation of a sample is that you pick the single point on the 65,536-point (logarithmic) line that is closest to the sound pressure level at that time. It's not like the points "below" your sound add up or anything. A loud sound gets a high number, and a quiet sound gets a low number. Both cases have the same pr…

PCM audio sampling is linear, not logarithmic. There are log sampling systems - e.g. A-law and u-law are used in telephone codecs. But uncompressed audio formats like PCM WAV are 100% linear. (Or should be, near enough.)

Not sure why you got downvoted, since you're right. Red Book audio uses linear PCM. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio#Aud...

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#375

Post by josteink »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #60
diydsp wrote: post #41

I agree with the silliness of 192kHz, but not 24-bits. Here is why: In typical PCM recordings, like CDs, mid-range frequencies (e.g. 1kHz to 4kHz) are recorded with lower amplitudes because our ears are more sensitive to them. Sampling theory is correct and 16-bits can reproduce any waveform with ~100dB of range, however, in a complex waveform consisting of low, mid and high frequencies, the mid- and hi-range frequen…

The correct way to attack this isn't by attacking the theory. It's to gather a lot of people and ask them to press a button indicating whether the audio they hear is 16-bit or 24-bit. If the results are no better than chance, then 24-bit doesn't matter, regardless of how sound the underlying argument is. EDIT: The experiment would also be extremely difficult to design. For example, you'd need to run this test with mu…

For example, you'd need to run this test with music, not simple sounds. So the question is, which music? I think whatever is most popular at the time would be a good candidate

A quick summary would be that most "popular" music has been mastered with the following goal: the song should be recognizable and listenable on a FM-radio with only a limited bandwidth midrange-speaker. One of the many things they do to achieve this is by eliminated almost all dynamic range through a process called "compression" (dynamic compression, not digital-compression).

They also limit the spectral range to not have "unheard" sounds cause distortion when played through limited bandwidth amplifiers and speakers.

This means that the kinds of musical pieces which could benefit from the increased dynamic range of 24-bit would be thoroughly excluded from the test.

And then you'd probably get the "expected" result, but only because you now test whether music mastered specifically not to have dynamic range benefits from having increased dynamic range. For which the answer is given.

Note: I'm not claiming 24-bit end-user audio has merits, of which I have little opinion. I'm just pointing out the flaw in the proposed experiment.

If you feed 24-bit input to headphones, there's no guarantee that the speakers are performing with 24-bit resolution.

Not sure if you're just imprecise in your language here or if you're genuinely confusing things. Speaker-elements, as found in both speakers and headphones are analogue. They operate according to the law of physics, and respond to changes in magnetic fields, for which there is practically no lower limit.

They have no digital resolution. A quick example: Take your 16-bit music, halve the volume and voila! You are now operating at "17-bit resolution". Halve it again. 18-bit resolution. Etc.

There's probably some minimum levels of accuracy, yes, but it just doesn't make sense to measure it in bits.

If you're aware of this and were just trying to adjust the language to the problem at hand, I'm sorry for being patronizing, but I just wanted to make sure we keep things factual here.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#376

Post by mhurron »

joshuacc wrote: post #372
mhurron wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> not all these people are idiots. Some of them are quite intelligent You can be very intelligent in one domain and be a complete idiot in every other domain. The result ends up being unless we're talking about that one domain, they're an idiot.

I would refer to that as knowledgeable and ignorant rather than intelligent and idiotic. It doesn't really make sense to say that Gary Kasparov is an idiot regarding the construction of log cabins. Rather, he is an intelligent person who is ignorant of the construction of log cabins.

> it doesn't really make sense to say that Gary Kasparov is an idiot regarding the construction of log cabins

It does if he starts voicing 'iditotic' opinions and beliefs as to the construction of log cabins.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#377

Post by goblin89 »

cthalupa wrote: post #181
threeseed wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Self-styled audiophiles are, by and large, idiots with way too much money plagued by magical thinking. Not just that. But the arrogance and fanboyism is rampant. God forbid you ever consider buying a Bose or Beats product.

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…

In response to your and your parent’s blanket claims

> Bose and beats* are by, every /objective/ measure, shitty products.

> God forbid you ever consider buying a Bose or Beats product.

If you need faithful audio reproduction, start with the room. There are reasons for buying a portable Bluetooth-enabled speaker, and also reasons one may consider specifically Bose SoundLink. Sound quality, in this sense, is not among them.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#378

Post by ecocentrik »

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.

This is slightly incorrect. The combination of bit length and sampling rate determine both dynamic range and frequency fidelity. Although it's common to hear the two values used to represent these two separate physical measurements, it's just another case of explaining new tech (80s CDs) to old technical consumers (70s hi-fi types). You can measure a reduction in dynamic range by reducing either sampling rate or bit length.

You'll frequently find 1-bit A/Ds and D/A at > 5Mhz on high fidelity systems. That 1-bit signal is converted to/from a higher bitrate, lower sampling rate signal without loss of fidelity. If you're interested in looking at alternate bitrate encodings you should just look at the Super Audio CD format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Audio_CD

On your second point, I agree, we live in a noisy world and hearing 144dB of dynamic range would require serious isolation.

What most people should be able to hear with 90Dbs of dynamic range, are the harmonics created by undersampling a high frequency signal. To quickly explain I'll use a 1-bit lower frequency scenario. Lets say we have a 2Khz sine wave and a 1-bit 5Khz sampling rate. The 2Khz signal is going to be represented by a different 2 samples every cycle. The result will be a signal that is no longer a sine wave and closer in frequency to 800Hz (wild approximation) than 2Khz. Low pass filters are used to to keep those harmonics from being too pervasive but they still sneak into the signal near the high frequency range. Transpose this example to our current audio standard and you might realize that in order to accurately represent the high end we need a little more than 16bit 48Khz.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#380

Post by retrogradeorbit »

hueving wrote: post #319
storrgie wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely get that as I personally prefer to collect Old Stock vacuum tubes for my listening purposes ( http://imgur.com/a/INXVX ). I just think folks should be left to their own devices to enjoy an avocation as they please. Trying to defend something through completely subjective argument is silly, I've a hard time discussing 'objectively better' technology with audiophole folks, but if someone said 'I like this…

>I just think folks should be left to their own devices to enjoy an avocation as they please. Only if they shut up and never tell other people that should be listening at 24/192. However, the people being complained about here spout nonsense like that all of the time.

Wait! Who's telling who what?

I think you find you have it backwards. I don't hear anyone here telling you that you should be listening at 24/192. Go look at all the comments and count them up. All I hear is people saying that you should be listening at 16/44, because it sounds exactly the same, or even sounds better, and if you think otherwise you're obviously an idiot, stupid, audiophool who spends $5000 on a power cable.

I sure know who I think should shut up. It's all those arm-chair-experts who don't even own any decent hifi gear. Why would they? It's all crap and my second hand ipod headphones beat it all hands down anyway. Right?

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