I'm not a big believer of audiophile stuff, but when I'm listening to 24k music I'm hearing new instruments, new sounds. It's not the case with everything though. Am I retarded ?
24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)
201–210 of 328 posts
Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
But aren't you worried you'll lose access to your music? I have to own it! I can't have it at the whim of multiple third parties to take down as they see fit. It's too important.
So where do you store these files that you'll never lose access? CDs? People with a room full of 8 tracks or cassettes would like to have a word. HDDs? Those fail all the time, plus any sort of natural disaster could wipe out your collection. Online backup? This seems like the only real option, but for me the risk/reward just doesn't fit. At least for now, the record companies and the service providers are both incen…
I had an album (albeit free) on bandcamp dissappear from my library.
Luckily it's on a backed up RAID6 array, in private server, streamable whenever I want.
I mirror all my purchases onto equipment I own, and so I guess I get the benefits of both.
Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)
#203I have a degree in electrical engineering, and I'm currently in a graduate course on computer music systems, so I hope that qualifies me enough to avoid the author's ad hominem attacks he seasons this stinkpiece with. I can't stand seeing frequency response charts and scientific measurements in articles about audio. Like my favorite audio reviewer says [1], I listen to music for enjoyment and I talk about audio in su…
> not "unexpected 14.5kHz falloff"
And yet just yesterday I was reading an audiophile magazine review that discussed a pair of $4,000 headphones and how the "transition from midrange into treble had something of a falloff that was confirmed by their equipment".
Music lovers listen to stereo equipment to hear their music. Audiophiles listen to music to hear their stereo equipment.
Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)
#204The only rebuttal to this that I have found compelling is that 24/192 downloads make sense if you are going to sample the music in your own creations. Recording and mixing with extra dynamic range, combined with only needing to low-pass once at the end has demonstrable advantages. Of course this was a response to marketing that was definitely not targeted at samplers, so it's not so much of a rebuttal as arguing at c…
Cymbals specifically produce a lot of ultrasonic audio, and some high sample rate recordings actually capture it. If you slow them down enough you can hear the difference.
Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
The reverse is overwhelmingly more likely. For 8khz+ frequencies (where most compression takes place) your hearing declines pretty quickly once you hit 30 years. Whatever real compression differences you're hearing at 20 will be largely gone 10 years later, and almost certainly 20 years later.
Not quite 30 -> 55+ is where we would expect to see presbycusis, And even though you may have diminished hearing you still have awareness of frequencies above 8Khz.
At 30 we're looking at typically 5db loss over 8khz, at 40 more than 10db. Sure, we're not talking about total hearing loss, but the reduced sensitivity is going to overwhelm any real artifacts from 16/44 that one might have genuinely detected at 20.
Imagined artifacts will probably remain or might even increase though, since people typically have much higher spending power at 40. :)
Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)
#206I have a related question that someone here probably has a good answer for. I recently heard a song I like on the radio while driving. Shortly after it played I pulled up the same song on Spotify with my phone, plugged my phone into the car stereo through the headphone jack, and played it. The quality was MUCH worse. What's the likely reason for that? I know very little about audio but my best guesses are: 1. The med…
Spotify definitely sends you low quality audio at times. Most people won't notice on common speakers and headphones, but even my "bad" speakers revealed the difference. Amazon Music seems to be pretty good as far as quality is concerned. I think they download the MP3s onto the phone's local storage so they don't have bandwidth issues? Either way, I could hear the difference between Spotify and Amazon music. The diffe…
The other thing to note is that Spotify will send you lower quality audio on the mobile vs. desktop client.
When I last moved, I plugged my phone (running Spotify) into my receiver to check that I'd gotten my speakers set up right. It was so muffled-sounding that I was worried I'd somehow damaged my speakers!
Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)
#207Please do not confuse the usefulness of 24/192 for playback and listening enjoyment, and it's usefulness for recording and heavy 'in the box' processing.
In the box processing uses 32-bit or 64-bit float. Fixed-point DSP processing was a thing maybe ten years ago, and even then the standard was 56-bit. 24-bit is nowhere close to good enough for ITB DSP.
That aside - the bit depth part of this article is silly and wrong. With an unprocessed acoustic recording, the difference between 16-bit and 24-bit sources is fairly easy to hear on professional equipment.
By the time rock/pop/IDM/etc has been mixed and mastered, the dynamic range can be so limited you might as well distribute it at 8-bits. (Barely an exaggeration, BTW.)
This is not even close to being true of jazz, orchestral, and folk recordings. Typically recording engineers allow somewhere between 10dB and 20dB for peaks, which means the actual recorded resolution of sustained non-peaky instruments and quiet sections is somewhere around 12-bits - comfortably low enough to hear quantisation errors, even with dither.
So for some genres, 16-bits is plenty. For others it's nowhere near good enough.
In 2019, there's really no practical reason not to distribute music as 24-bit FLAC for high-end use. If you're listening on mobile you may as well use one of the better compressed formats. But for home playback, 24-bit is master-tape quality with no significant downside.
Sampling rate is a more complex issue. 48k is significantly better than 44.1k for the reasons mentioned.
Vinyl can go up to 100k or so, although not very accurately, and some people - including some very highly respected professional audio equipment designers, like Rupert Neve - believe that makes a difference.
But it's very hard to record ultrasonics "just in case" because the microphone->preamp->ADC chain has to handle them accurately, and that rarely happens. So there's very little of value up there in most recordings anyway - although maybe more on vintage tape masters than on modern digital recordings.
Personally I'm equally happy with 48k or 96k. The 192k recordings I've heard have been disappointing, possibly because of the intermodulation effects, but also because jitter becomes more of a problem at high rates.
Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
But who is using MP3 players these days any more? I found myself to buy an iPod in... like... 2011 or so. Converted all the CDs I had to FLAC because losless was the way to go. Two or three years (let it be 5, doesn't matter) pass by, I got a better Smartphone, Spotify Premium and don't touch my 1xx GB of FLAC music anymore, because I don't want to carry around another device etc. I'm not sure but I think "owning" mu…
I rip my CDs in a two-step process: first to FLAC, then convert to mp3. The mp3s go in my phone, I have 33GB so far and my collection isn't even half ripped. I haven't checked how big the FLACs are lately but I'm sure they'd be a much bigger burden.
I've been ripping to FLAC, and then convert to ALAC via avconv. The ALAC files go into iTunes, FLAC files stay on my server as an "archive". I then let iTunes convert the files it syncs to my phone / ipad to which ever size I need for that device, and I can still listen to uncompressed songs when I'm at my desk.
I keep the Flac around in case sometime in the future I want to change formats for whatever reason.
Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the 1990s, car stereos sometimes had a "loudness" button which did exactly as you suggest.
Going back, seemingly forever, home stereos also had a "loudness" button. Many still do. Usually, there's just some equalization involved, so it's not exactly what I'm suggesting.
Correct, the "loudness" function is a compensation in the lower frequencies in relation with the volume level, most modern DSPs have that.
Re: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
I rip my CDs in a two-step process: first to FLAC, then convert to mp3. The mp3s go in my phone, I have 33GB so far and my collection isn't even half ripped. I haven't checked how big the FLACs are lately but I'm sure they'd be a much bigger burden.
Slightly off topic, but do you use something other than iTunes for this process? I'm looking for a good way to manage a FLAC library.
I made comment a little further up before I saw this, but there's lossless format that iTunes and Apple devices support called ALAC. You can convert to and from FLAC files with avconv.