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24/192 music downloads make no sense

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Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#11

Post by JonnieCache »

thwest wrote: post #6
saidajigumi wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll note that's the entire point of Monty's (great) article, which has this near the top: Unfortunately, there is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format. Its playback fidelity is slightly inferior to 16/44.1 or 16/48, and it takes up 6 times the space. This has all been known to anyone with actual signal processing and/or audio engineering knowledge for a long time now. As in, common knowledge to the…

There's a reasonable argument that fits within DSP theory that frequencies sampled above audible range could have harmonics down in the audible range.

This is addressed in the article. While theoretically relevant to some recording applications, (overdubbing a string section one violin at a time, why would you want to do that?) this kind of intermodulation distortion can only harm the reproduction of mixed material.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#12

Post by muraiki »

hatsunearu wrote: post #10

The single worst thing that harms audio quality is excessive compression. It's ruining everything, I'd say. Heck, I'm sure everyone who knows their worth would agree that compression harms audio quality. Recommended reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war edit: compression as in dynamic range compression, not data compression like mp3 in audio

Reading "compression" as both a programmer and audio-minded person made that first sentence difficult to parse at first. :)

But yeah, it's obvious when I have my car stereo nearly on max to listen to classical or jazz, and then if I turn the radio and get a pop music station my ears are about to explode.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#13

Post by klodolph »

splitdisk wrote: post #8

From my experience, what matters more than sample rate is 24 bit vs. 16 bit sampling in the recording/production process. Using heavy compression and EQ can mean that very quiet sounds can become louder, in this case 24 bit recording is ideal. Sample rate wise, anything above 40khz is fine for most ears (I've probably lost a few khz in the upper range anyways) Another note is that most converters operate at a multipl…

I can still hear around the 20k range, so let's not exclude a few listeners just because we wear hearing protection when it matters. In practice, 20k audio content means 44k or higher sample rates, due to the fact that actual filters have finite transition bands. There's an unfortunate history of engineers with poor hearing who inflict pain on others, such as the horizontal retrace on NTSC TVs which still annoys me when I encounter one.

24bit also means we don't have to record at 0dBFS, which saves a lot of time.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#14

Post by ianferrel »

andy_ppp wrote: post #5

Why do high quality DACs clearly sound better then? And they sound better with better files. Maybe it really is all in my head but I mean listening to a £20000 hifi the other day (vinyl) really just shocked me. I was listening to Marvin Gaye on my friends system and I could hear that there were several different backing singers all moving and at different distances from the microphone. Are there any double blind tria…

Wine tastes better when it's poured out of fancy bottles, too.

The article mentions just such a study performed with high end equipment.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#15

Post by sliverstorm »

To what can I attribute the consistently horrible quality of 64kHz streams ten or fifteen years ago? Would that fall under the "bad encoder" bucket?

Edit: christ, I mixed up bitrates (e.g. 192kbps) with sampling frequency (e.g. 192kHz) again. I was referring to 64kbps streams.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#16

Post by JonnieCache »

muraiki wrote: post #12
hatsunearu wrote: post #10

The single worst thing that harms audio quality is excessive compression. It's ruining everything, I'd say. Heck, I'm sure everyone who knows their worth would agree that compression harms audio quality. Recommended reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war edit: compression as in dynamic range compression, not data compression like mp3 in audio

Reading "compression" as both a programmer and audio-minded person made that first sentence difficult to parse at first. :) But yeah, it's obvious when I have my car stereo nearly on max to listen to classical or jazz, and then if I turn the radio and get a pop music station my ears are about to explode.

Don't worry, the loudness war is basically over. itunes and youtube normalize everything to -15dbRMS and -13dbRMS respectively. Spotify uses the ReplayGain algorithm. Broadcasters worldwide now use the EBU R128 standard, which is a more effective form of loudness normalization, hopefully to be adopted by online services too at some point. All that's required is for personal media players to widely implement loudness normalization (by default) for preexisting records in peoples collections.

http://productionadvice.co.uk/lufs-dbfs-rms/

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#17

Post by CamperBob2 »

sliverstorm wrote: post #15

To what can I attribute the consistently horrible quality of 64kHz streams ten or fifteen years ago? Would that fall under the "bad encoder" bucket? Edit: christ, I mixed up bitrates (e.g. 192kbps) with sampling frequency (e.g. 192kHz) again. I was referring to 64kbps streams.

64 kHz isn't a standard sample rate -- you're probably thinking of the bit rate of an MP3 or AAC file. A 64-kbit MP3 does sound pretty awful.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#19

Post by splitdisk »

klodolph wrote: post #13
splitdisk wrote: post #8

From my experience, what matters more than sample rate is 24 bit vs. 16 bit sampling in the recording/production process. Using heavy compression and EQ can mean that very quiet sounds can become louder, in this case 24 bit recording is ideal. Sample rate wise, anything above 40khz is fine for most ears (I've probably lost a few khz in the upper range anyways) Another note is that most converters operate at a multipl…

I can still hear around the 20k range, so let's not exclude a few listeners just because we wear hearing protection when it matters. In practice, 20k audio content means 44k or higher sample rates, due to the fact that actual filters have finite transition bands. There's an unfortunate history of engineers with poor hearing who inflict pain on others, such as the horizontal retrace on NTSC TVs which still annoys me w…

I'm very jealous of your healthy hearing range... I now wear hearing protection, but the damage has been done. When it comes to file storage, I will take a 44.1/48K 24 bit FLAC happily, since it usually comes out to the same size as a CD-Q WAV file anyways. I see no reason why everything shouldn't be in this format, but CD's have made a serious dent in formatting standards/habits.

Re: 24/192 music downloads make no sense

#20

Post by CamperBob2 »

hatsunearu wrote: post #10

The single worst thing that harms audio quality is excessive compression. It's ruining everything, I'd say. Heck, I'm sure everyone who knows their worth would agree that compression harms audio quality. Recommended reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war edit: compression as in dynamic range compression, not data compression like mp3 in audio

This. The reality is that we're arguing over whether it's best to use 16 bits or 24 bits to distribute 8-12 bits worth of information. The problem that really needs to be addressed is in the studio, not in the iTunes store. Compression-happy producers are doing more than their share of the work required to make music suck.

Edit: Some useful educational material to read before moderating: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war .

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