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24/192 music downloads are silly

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Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#261

Post by richardw »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #214
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.

> God forbid you ever consider buying a Bose or Beats product. Meh, they're okay, but there are better choices out there. I've a pair of Sennheiser HD600 and it's one of those things that make you go "holy cow, all the hype is justified". And no, I'm not one of those folks who think gold-plated cables make a difference. Right now I'm listening to MP3 Internet radio on a pair of cheap behind the neck street cans.

A friend has had a set of these for ages. We found a difference between two source setups. A particular Sony DVD player sounded incredible - each note seemed perceptible in a 3D space [1]. A CD player he had, didn't. [2] We tried with Yamaha amp, without, different configs of widgets. That DVD player with nothing added was the best. He gave it to his sister and I haven't heard anything like that since.

I nearly went off on a tangent and bought an amp etc, but I'm happy with my much cheaper HD380's - great price/performance :) But those 600's are awesome.

[1] I've since learned it's called soundstage

[2] How would the source influence soundstage? Sounds irrational to me. Hey, one sounded better than the other and I don't know why.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#262

Post by orbitur »

copperx wrote: post #90
IvyMike wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's do the math. If I didn't screw it up (and I probably did), an 8k iphone 6 would be around 1600 dpi.

Imagine being able to use a physical magnifier to see more information on the screen. Wouldn't that be great? at least for a curious child?

Like microfiche?

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#263

Post by mark-r »

gumby wrote: post #192
Wicher wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some people buy mats to put onto your CDs before putting the CD in a player An 80-minute, 700 MB CD-R fits 80 * 60 * 44100 * 2 * 2 / 2^20 ~= 807 MB of audio. Why is that? The 100MB difference is not just due to the audio TOC being of smaller size than the ISO9660 or UDF file system metadata. It's also because of differences in error correction. I don't have the spec on hand but I recall from when I was investigatin…

> Vibration is one of the factors that would make the same audio CD, read with the same CD player, produce different digital signals some of the time or even every time. Err, no. That makes sense when you have an analog version of the audio picked up by an analog transducer (i.e. a vinyl record) but makes no sense with an isochronous stream of quantized samples. I suppose a vibration could cause a small phase shift i…

There was a day when the clock going in to the D/A converter could be affected by the bitstream coming off the CD. Those days are long gone I'm sure. Everything is buffered in RAM, overclocked, and digitally processed before it hits the D/A.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#264

Post by thirdsun »

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…

While I think that there are people who actually can tell the difference between lossless and lossy audio (with a decent bitrate), I'm not counting me among them.

Yet, I only buy lossless music since I plan to keep my music library around for ages and this allows me to change to a different format in the future if needed. This is an aspect of lossless audio, which is often overlooked.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#265

Post by retrogradeorbit »

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…

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 not.

All of this is besides the point. I'd much prefer a 24/44 sample than a 16/96 or 16/192. Bit depth has a much larger impact on the sound than sample rate.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#266

Post by jboggan »

Stratoscope wrote: post #253
Lazlo_Nibble wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, no. Bit-perfect ripping is trivial and routine, and tools like the AccurateRip DB (which has checksums for around three million different titles you can use to verify the checksums on your own rips) and the CUEtools database (which has recovery records you can use to correct bit errors on your own rips) prove it. I routinely get bit-accurate single-pass high-speed rips--no "paranoid" settings or re-reads--of disc…

Oh sure, your rips may be perfect at the bit level, but how do you know that they're free of sub-bit quantization that isn't detectable by electronic circuits but can be heard by the human ear? This sub-bit jitter and interference can travel along with a digital file and sneak right past your ordinary bit-level error detection and correction, no matter how lossless you make it. That's because these errors aren't visi…

We've discovered digital homeopathy.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#267

Post by kazinator »

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…

Bose knows how to coax a bass note or two out of a small plastic box.

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#268

Post by crazy1van »

Wicher wrote: post #131
masklinn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some people buy $500 wooden knobs to make their volume pots sound better. (or was that a hoax? i can't tell anymore) Some people buy small pyramids to elevate their cables off the floor, some people buy mats to put onto your CDs before putting the CD in a player ( http://dagogo.com/millenniums-m-cd-mat-carbon-cd-damper-revi... ), some people buy $1000+/meter digital interconnect cables ( http://www.theabsolutesound…

> some people buy mats to put onto your CDs before putting the CD in a player An 80-minute, 700 MB CD-R fits 80 * 60 * 44100 * 2 * 2 / 2^20 ~= 807 MB of audio. Why is that? The 100MB difference is not just due to the audio TOC being of smaller size than the ISO9660 or UDF file system metadata. It's also because of differences in error correction. I don't have the spec on hand but I recall from when I was investigatin…

> I read into this when I was wondering why my CD-DA extracted .wavs came out with a different checksum every time.

You sure there isn't something in the wavs like a creation date field that would always cause the checksum to be different? That would make way more sense than "vibration"....

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#269

Post by retrogradeorbit »

badsock wrote: post #162
hackinthebochs wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

192kHz may not be as silly as you think: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10848570

Thanks for posting that! However, it's worth point out that that study has its detractors: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypersonic_effect I find the intermodulation argument a convincing one - it's hard to not have it affect the test, and if they haven't taken specific steps to avoid it then it would be easy to join a large amount of tests that have fallen prey to it. I note, however, that Wikipedia doesn't mention a…

What gets me about the intermodulation effect is that some people want to have it both ways. They are so stuck in the 'there is no difference' camp they fail to see the self contradiction in the argument.

On one hand, higher frequencies above 20KHz can't be heard at all, so there's no point having them! You can't hear them!

Then on the other hand, higher frequencies above 20kHz affect the audible region of the sound (intermodulation distortion), so you can hear them, so make sure they aren't there!

What if the presence of the higher frequencies in a spectrum that shares a harmonic relation to the audible region causes intermodulation distortion that is pleasing and musical to the ear. What if the complete absence of this high frequency information, or alternatively a non-harmonic higher frequency signal (say some kind of switching or power supply noise) causes the audible region to be perceived in a less pleasant manner?

Re: 24/192 music downloads are silly

#270

Post by onion2k »

elwell wrote: post #39
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…

If it is no better, then the person who thinks it is better benefits from it. If it is better, then the person who thinks it is better benefits from it. If it is no better, then the person who thinks it is no better doesn't benefit from it. If it is better, then the person who thinks it is no better doesn't benefit from it. If the objective is subjective benefit, then placebo is a benefit; assuming your bank account…

If it is no better, then the person who thinks it is better benefits from it.

Only if everything else is equal. It's rare that's no downside to the benefit - for example, something costing more because it's "better".

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