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24/192 music downloads are silly

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Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#411

Post by ecocentrik »

badsock wrote: post #405
ecocentrik wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I figured it had something to do with the application of digital filters. There are only two significant samples of a source at half the sampling rate, so it should be able to represent a frequency at exactly half the sampling rate but I can't see how it could accurately represent a frequency at just a few hz below 1/2 the sampling rate. Notice I'm using the word frequency. A sine wave with a frequency of 22,050hz en…

Right, 22,050hz looks exactly like a triangle wave on a computer screen. The thing is that a triangle wave is composed of a fundamental sine wave (22kHz), and a series of ascending odd harmonics above it. So after the filters nix everything above 22kHz it looks exactly like a sine wave on a scope. So you're right that you lose information as you go higher in frequency, but there is also commensurately less need for i…

Sure 22,050hz and 11,025hz get smoothed out into perfect sine waves and the human ear can't hear 22Khz anyway. But the Nyquest frequency isn't some magical threshold that you cross and suddenly everything is perfectly preserved. It's a folding frequency that determines where aliasing is going to occur, or rather where it's not going to occur. A 44Khz sampling rate is based roughly on western tuning (440Hz A) and makes no attempt to accurately capture sounds and frequencies that are not tuned to western music. As you move away from the folding frequency, there are frequencies in the human audible range that can not be represented, so they're discarded or attenuated by anti-aliasing filters. As far as I'm concerned CD audio is outdated tech that most of the world just doesn't care enough to drop. It's ridiculous in a world of 5K retina screens that people can't see the value in higher resolution audio.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#412

Post by tsotha »

cLeEOGPw wrote: post #386
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…

> but not all these people are idiots Not to be picky, but it bugs me to see when people talk about two different things and don't understand each other. Intelligence is not a linear value that could be compared like "person1 intelligence > person2 intelligence". With both of these terms there are always skipped implication of the area of intelligence. By "idiots" he meant "small amount of/incorrect knowledge in the…

If you're going to be "picky", please be picky about something you understand. A "small amount of/incorrect knowledge" is ignorance, not a lack of intelligence. When you label someone an idiot you're not talking about his lack of knowledge. You're talking about his intelligence.

Now, if by "idiots" he means "ignorant people" then he's using the word incorrectly. But there's no actual indication that's what he meant. At some point you just have to assume people mean what they say.

And despite what people want to believe, the last fifty years of psychometrics research indicates there really is such a thing as "basic intelligence" (which they call "g"), and people with more of it do better on a wide range of intellectual tasks. So you really can say "person1 intelligence > person2 intelligence".

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#413

Post by ChrisGranger »

retrogradeorbit wrote: post #373
ChrisGranger wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 techno…

What's the argument in favor of using extremely high sampling rates though? Using 48 kHz instead of 44.1 seems reasonable (as in the Philips digital compact cassette that never really caught on), giving a little bit of headroom for wider frequency response, moving the filters a little higher or whatever, but I've seen D/A convertors that use 384 kHz, and I just can't fathom what the point is... It smacks of the "if some is good, more must be better" mentality.

There's definitely nothing crazy about wanting to hear a recording with as much fidelity to the master as possible. Yeah, I do remember people saying that 128 kbps MP3 was "CD quality" in the early days of the format, and that was a laughable claim indeed. One would have to be pretty tin-eared to think 128 kbps was hi-fi, although I'd say there were valid use cases for it, at least back when portable music players had storage in the megabyte range instead of the gigabytes we have today.

So many of those audiophile tweaks are just outright scams, and a fool and his money are soon parted. I guess education is the only way to combat that.

As for Emerick's ability to hear anything at 54 kHz, much less discern a 3 dB difference there, well, I am really, really skeptical. I'm obviously not in a position to say it's impossible, but it strikes me as an outright superhuman ability that should have been tested scientifically.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#414

Post by KeytarHero »

dragonwriter wrote: post #408
KeytarHero wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's what audio mastering is for. A good mastering engineer tests their masters on iPhone headphones as well as studio monitors. > I would not expect a willingness to exploit consumers' magical thinking to be a good signal for quality engineering. Companies do this all the time, not just in audio, and they have for years. I don't know why most consumers would need a phone with a camera more than 8 MP, when most use…

> I don't know why most consumers would need a phone with a camera more than 8 MP, when most users will only ever display it on a 1080p (~2 MP) screen. (1) Many computers, TVs, tablets, smartphones, and laptops now have screens with greater than 1080p resolution ("Quad HD" 2560x1440 is particularly common), so I don't thinks it true that most will only ever display pictures on a 1080p screen, heck, many of them will…

(1) That's beside the point. Even if a phone has a 4k display, they still don't need a camera of more than about 8MP to display it on screen.

(2) Yeah, I get this use case, and I understand why there are DSLRs that big. But how many cameraphone users are actually cropping their images so extremely that they need 41 megapixels? Phone makers don't put 41 MP sensors for the niche market of users who need cameras that good but don't have a DSLR; they do it because the majority of their customer base thinks "the more pixels the better".

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#415

Post by ChrisGranger »

ecocentrik wrote: post #411
badsock wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, 22,050hz looks exactly like a triangle wave on a computer screen. The thing is that a triangle wave is composed of a fundamental sine wave (22kHz), and a series of ascending odd harmonics above it. So after the filters nix everything above 22kHz it looks exactly like a sine wave on a scope. So you're right that you lose information as you go higher in frequency, but there is also commensurately less need for i…

Sure 22,050hz and 11,025hz get smoothed out into perfect sine waves and the human ear can't hear 22Khz anyway. But the Nyquest frequency isn't some magical threshold that you cross and suddenly everything is perfectly preserved. It's a folding frequency that determines where aliasing is going to occur, or rather where it's not going to occur. A 44Khz sampling rate is based roughly on western tuning (440Hz A) and make…

>It's ridiculous in a world of 5K retina screens that people can't see the value in higher resolution audio.

Not if they can't hear the value in higher resolution audio. For many people the only difference in HD audio over 16-bit 44.1 Khz is that the files are bigger. If someone can't hear the difference, it's no surprise that they don't care to move to a new format.

The screen analogy isn't perfect as most people can still readily tell the difference between an HD image and a significantly lower resolution one. (Though yeah, we're getting closer to pixel densities surpassing people's ability to resolve pixels as well, provided they're not putting their nose to the screen. It won't be too long now.)

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#416

Post by ChrisGranger »

davidgerard wrote: post #410
chubot wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is baffling to me that people even talk about 24/192. There are such vast differences in audio quality related to speakers, loudness, amplifier, mastering, and EQ, before you even get to the source format. For some reason people seem to latch on to the format thing, before being able to make judgements about the more important factors.

I mind the Alan Parsons interview - a sound engineer whose own music is favoured by many audiophiles - who says, guess what: fix the room first. http://boingboing.net/2012/02/10/alan-parsons-on-audiophiles... "I do think in the domestic environment, the people that have sufficient equipment don’t pay enough attention to room acoustics. The pro audio guy will prioritize room acoustics and do the necessary treatments t…

This, absolutely. The single most important thing in the audio chain from the electrical plug at the wall to your ears is the room...

An actual live musician can still sound poor in an acoustically-terrible room.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#418

Post by dragonwriter »

KeytarHero wrote: post #414
dragonwriter wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't know why most consumers would need a phone with a camera more than 8 MP, when most users will only ever display it on a 1080p (~2 MP) screen. (1) Many computers, TVs, tablets, smartphones, and laptops now have screens with greater than 1080p resolution ("Quad HD" 2560x1440 is particularly common), so I don't thinks it true that most will only ever display pictures on a 1080p screen, heck, many of them will…

(1) That's beside the point. Even if a phone has a 4k display, they still don't need a camera of more than about 8MP to display it on screen. (2) Yeah, I get this use case, and I understand why there are DSLRs that big. But how many cameraphone users are actually cropping their images so extremely that they need 41 megapixels? Phone makers don't put 41 MP sensors for the niche market of users who need cameras that go…

> But how many cameraphone users are actually cropping their images so extremely that they need 41 megapixels? Phone makers don't put 41 MP sensors for the niche market of users who need cameras that good but don't have a DSLR; they do it because the majority of their customer base thinks "the more pixels the better".

Actually, the Nokia 41MP sensor is sold as enabling high-power digital zoom, which is the feature (with the associated benefit of taking clear pictures from much further away than with other phones) of the phone most heavily touted in the TV ads for the phones with the sensor. And digital zoom is exactly the same thing as cropping.

So, no, I don't think the actual marketing of the phone supports the idea that 41MP sensor is targeted at people using MP as a quality metric disconnected from any concrete utility, its targeted at selling a very specific benefit.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#419

Post by badsock »

ecocentrik wrote: post #411
badsock wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, 22,050hz looks exactly like a triangle wave on a computer screen. The thing is that a triangle wave is composed of a fundamental sine wave (22kHz), and a series of ascending odd harmonics above it. So after the filters nix everything above 22kHz it looks exactly like a sine wave on a scope. So you're right that you lose information as you go higher in frequency, but there is also commensurately less need for i…

Sure 22,050hz and 11,025hz get smoothed out into perfect sine waves and the human ear can't hear 22Khz anyway. But the Nyquest frequency isn't some magical threshold that you cross and suddenly everything is perfectly preserved. It's a folding frequency that determines where aliasing is going to occur, or rather where it's not going to occur. A 44Khz sampling rate is based roughly on western tuning (440Hz A) and make…

Which gets back to your original point about both sample rate and bit depth contributing to the dynamic range. I'm very curious: can you give me some search keywords that would get me to the math behind that? Also, I've never heard the claim that the 44.1kHz rate biases toward 440Hz tuning, is there somewhere I can read more about that?

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#420

Post by Andys »

chubot wrote: post #35
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…

It is baffling to me that people even talk about 24/192. There are such vast differences in audio quality related to speakers, loudness, amplifier, mastering, and EQ, before you even get to the source format. For some reason people seem to latch on to the format thing, before being able to make judgements about the more important factors.

Quality headphones is how most people even get close to it mattering.
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