24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012) • Hacker News Board

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)

#201

Post by enneff » Wed, Aug 30, 2017, 4:33 AM UTC

arrrvalue wrote: post #138

and yet, we are nowhere near being able to electronically reproduce a live acoustic music performance. have you ever walked by a bunch of musical sound coming out of a room and thought to yourself, "wow, those live musicians sound great" only to discover it was just a stereo playing? nope. as engineers we will never solve this problem as long as the "44.1kHz is good enough" dogma is perpetuated. here's a question. wh…

> have you ever walked by a bunch of musical sound coming out of a room and thought to yourself, "wow, those live musicians sound great" only to discover it was just a stereo playing?

Yes, I have. With the right combination of speaker setups and hi fi recordings, it is possible to fool yourself into believing there are musicians there.

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)

#202

Post by mailslot » Wed, Aug 30, 2017, 4:46 AM UTC

I don't know. It could be very useful once cellphone makers find out how to blast audio directly into nerve impulses. New and innovative audio filters. Humans with custom DNA. Etc.

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)

#203

Post by obrajesse » Wed, Aug 30, 2017, 4:49 AM UTC

IgorPartola wrote: post #87

jahnu wrote: post #18

I've said it before, this video demo is one of the very best I've ever seen. https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml So well prepared, so well presented, so little that could be removed without ruining it. I aspire to do such good demos but always fall so short.

That is fantastic. The presenter manages to pull of "charismatic engineer" really well.

Well, he is a very charismatic engineer...

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)

#204

Post by nightcracker » Wed, Aug 30, 2017, 4:52 AM UTC

Const-me wrote: post #166

kazinator wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not believe it. 24 bits is definitely needed for processing (better yet, use floating-point). Not 192 kHz; no friggin' way. Repeated processing through multiple blocks at a given sample rate does not produce cumulative discretization problems in the time domain; it's just not how the math works.

> better yet, use floating-point Both your inputs (ADC) and outputs (DAC) are fixed-point. Why would you want to use a floating point in between? Technically, 64-bit floating point format would be enough for precision. But that would inflate both bandwidth and CPU requirements for no value. 32-bit floating point ain’t enough. Many people in the industry already use 32-bit integers for these samples. > Not 192 kHz; no…

> Both your inputs (ADC) and outputs (DAC) are fixed-point. Why would you want to use a floating point in between?

The main reason is that it solves clipping in the pipeline.

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)

#205

Post by josteink » Wed, Aug 30, 2017, 4:56 AM UTC

fusiongyro wrote: post #14

acchow wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Its playback fidelity is slightly inferior to 16/44.1 or 16/48, and it takes up 6 times the space. The article is highly technical. Does anyone have a way to describe this phenomenon intuitively?

Basically, the sampling theorem says you can reconstruct the exact waveform with a certain number of samples. Adding a bunch more samples bulks up the file, but you didn't need them to restore the exact waveform. However, the unnecessary samples are in the file between you and the next sample you do need. At high enough levels of waste this creates an I/O bottleneck that hampers performance. Another way to look at is…

> Another way to look at is that digital audio is not like digital imaging. There aren't pixels.

For the mathematically inclined, this would probably be a good time to repeat: pixels are not little squares[1].

[1] http://alvyray.com/Memos/CG/Microsoft/6_pixel.pdf

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)

#206

Post by rblatz » Wed, Aug 30, 2017, 4:57 AM UTC

donatj wrote: post #198

rblatz wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you had cataract surgery? I know that can have an impact on visible spectrum depending on the replacement lens they put in.

Nope, I'm afraid not. I never noticed until maybe 3 years ago, so I think it's a newer development. I'm 31. I also got glasses this year for the first time in my life, which the need for came on rather suddenly... So maybe it's linked with some kind of degeneration? I really can't say. I honestly didn't think to mention it to the doctor, but now I'm thinking maybe I should have.

I'm not an ophthalmologist, so if you are concerned about your eye health talk to one. That being said I was referencing that the human eye (retina) is capable of seeing a wider spectrum than we typically see. The natural lens filters out part of the spectrum (UV) that the synthetic replacement lenses do not filter out.

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)

#207

Post by krisdol » Wed, Aug 30, 2017, 4:58 AM UTC

tigerBL00D wrote: post #200

If you are downloading to simply consume, then sure. But as others have noted this article assumes that mastering is always the last step in the editing process. Anyone who ever remixed, sampled or DJ'ed will disagree. If we keep that in mind, then the setup of the problem changes significantly and most arguments made here do not apply to the download itself.

Right. I used to DJ throughout college and tried out a variety of formats. At high amplification, artifacts become apparent. VBR0 and 256kbit MP3s did not hold up, at all. Even smaller speakers and headphones didn't hide some of the compression artifacts for me.

320kbit CBR MP3s were... I'd say, generally OK if you did not plan on skewing their tempo much outside of a very small range (give or take 5% speed). Really bad artifacting becomes audible quickly beyond that range. Maybe it was placebo, but I also found differences between FLAC and 320kbit MP3 discernible when working on big, more powerful speakers.

But, with FLAC, it didn't matter if the sound was played at 10% tempo or extreme amplitude, audio was always crisp, clear, and free of compression artifacts (obviously).

On my laptop speakers or earbuds, no way would I be able to tell the difference between any of these today.

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)

#208

Post by sitharus » Wed, Aug 30, 2017, 4:59 AM UTC

euyyn wrote: post #185

Const-me wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> better yet, use floating-point Both your inputs (ADC) and outputs (DAC) are fixed-point. Why would you want to use a floating point in between? Technically, 64-bit floating point format would be enough for precision. But that would inflate both bandwidth and CPU requirements for no value. 32-bit floating point ain’t enough. Many people in the industry already use 32-bit integers for these samples. > Not 192 kHz; no…

> Therefore, extra temporal resolution helps. But it's not resolution, right? It's extra frequencies outside the audible range. Is there any natural process that would make those affect the audible components, if I were listening to the music live instead of a recording?

Yes, you can get a beat effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beat_(acoustics)) as the ultrasonic frequencies interfere with the audible ones. It's generally not considered desirable.

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)

#209

Post by lz400 » Wed, Aug 30, 2017, 5:02 AM UTC

kazinator wrote: post #146

lz400 wrote: post #140

There's a very straightforward practical reason why you might want to keep downloading 24/192. The people who put those together are on average "audiophile" snobs so the rips tend to be perfect, often from high quality sources like SACDs, hdtracks, etc. The source of the recording is usually the best master known for that record (special remastered editions, etc.). If you download mp3/spotify chances are the copy you…

So, in other words: bite the bandwidth bullet and get the 192 material, but for Pete's sake, do yourself a favor and downsample to 44.1.

If you have the patience, sure. In my desktop I keep everything on the big file source and listen to it that way. I also have dedicated DACs/AMPs that can decode all the way up to DSD. I know it probably doesn't make a difference but whatever, storage is cheap. For my phone I listen to spotify.

Re: 24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed (2012)

#210

Post by em3rgent0rdr » Wed, Aug 30, 2017, 5:08 AM UTC

lz400 wrote: post #140

There's a very straightforward practical reason why you might want to keep downloading 24/192. The people who put those together are on average "audiophile" snobs so the rips tend to be perfect, often from high quality sources like SACDs, hdtracks, etc. The source of the recording is usually the best master known for that record (special remastered editions, etc.). If you download mp3/spotify chances are the copy you…

> "If you download mp3/spotify"

You are misconstruing Monty's argument here. He is very much against mp3...in fact he says he could tell the difference between high bitrate mp3 and 16 bit 44k wav. The real point of the video is that 16 bit 44k wav is beyond sufficient...don't need to go beyond that to 24-bit 192kHz.