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

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

#361

Post by rocqua » Wed, Aug 30, 2017, 2:00 PM UTC

72deluxe wrote: post #279

mtzet wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed the same thing with LP's. While LP's are technically inferior to red book CD's, they're often mastered better.

Why is this? I only have 16 bit 44.1kHz "normal" CDs and I notice some terrible mastering jobs, eg. RHCP Stadium Arcadium loses the snare for the first track and is like listening to minutes of distortion yet apparently the vinyl was really well mastered. Is there a technical reason why the mastering is so different for the two mediums, CD versus vinyl?

I've seen it argued that multi-disc setups are where the loudness wars started. When you can switch between CDs quickly, you start comparing how they sound. If the volume knob is left alone, the CD that is mastered louder is going to sound louder, and thus better.

Thus, people started mastering CDs for loudness.

An alternative idea of mine is simpler. Loud music is considered worse than quiet music (quiet music sounds worse, but loud music still does, and also bothers other people). So, when you need to pick a volume setting for your collection, you bias towards setting it lower, so the really loud ones don't become too loud. Thus, the quieter CDs are annoying because they always sound quiet, whilst the load CDs sound about right, because your volume is much more suitable for them.

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

#362

Post by tomlu » Wed, Aug 30, 2017, 2:04 PM UTC

Veratyr wrote: post #30

Perhaps this is a silly question but the explanations mostly make perfect sense to me but in the case of sample rate, what happens when two waves with very different frequencies overlap? Say I've got an 18kHz wave and a 9kHz wave and the 9kHz wave is ever so slightly out of phase. Then imagine there are 10 different waves under 20kHz all interfering with each other in different wages. Is it still possible to reproduc…

> Is it still possible to reproduce everything accurately?

Sound is linear, so yes. Any signal can be represented correctly as a sum of frequencies.

> wouldn't higher bit depth increase the fidelity in the range the audio does fill?

When you do the maths quantisation turns into the original sound + quantization noise. The bit range determines the noise (dither helps here). So it's a question of whether the noise is loud enough to hear. There are samples on the internet you can try to determine yourself at which stage you can notice the noise. It's shocking how few bits are actually required.

For a sloppy recording or repeated processing the quantisation noise goes up, so more bits are required.

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

#363

Post by codeulike » Wed, Aug 30, 2017, 2:05 PM UTC

Fifer82 wrote: post #287

z3t4 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly most people have never experienced good sound. When you hear it though. But taste can be very different.

I have! I really have! My friend spends all his money on audio. I sadly just don't understand. You are correct. I was going to say that he pays infinite money for what to me is a 10% increase in enjoyment, but perhaps for you and him, your brain is better with sound, and you guys might get a 1000% improvement for your dollar. Although in any case, nothing justifies the pricetag dished out to audio enthusiasts.

I feel really sorry for audiophiles because they have to spend lots of money on expensive equipment to eliminate the perceived shortcomings that the rest of us are not troubled by during our enjoyment of music.

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

#364

Post by rocqua » Wed, Aug 30, 2017, 2:05 PM UTC

toothbrush wrote: post #294

Buge wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where do you get the 5ms from? Why is 192 more likely to have lower latency? I would think the higher bandwidth required by 192 has the possibility to slow your computer down and cause more latency.

I believe the parent might be referring to the myth about attack of signal falling "between the cracks" of digital sampling. This is debunked in the video linked elsewhere, in the chapter titled "bandlimitation and timing". I might be wrong about the parent poster's meaning, though.

See the excelent answer by zaxomi for another more favorable interpretation of the parent. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15131280

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

#365

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Aug 30, 2017, 2:07 PM UTC

rplst8 wrote: post #337

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #190

Not entirely silly. Yes, the purported benefits of this high-fidelity audio are imaginary or even include undesirable traits. However, when most "remasters" of pop music today involve the dynamics being boosted to "loudness wars" standards for a target audience of people listening to the music through earbuds in the street, the 24/192 downloads or SACD releases are often the only way to hear the album with real dynam…

> Not entirely silly. Yes, the purported benefits of this high-fidelity audio are imaginary or even include undesirable traits. However, when most "remasters" of pop music today involve the dynamics being boosted to "loudness wars" standards for a target audience of people listening to the music through earbuds in the street, the 24/192 downloads or SACD releases are often the only way to hear the album with real dyn…

[deleted]

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

#366

Post by donatj » Wed, Aug 30, 2017, 2:11 PM UTC

xiphmont wrote: post #229

donatj wrote: post #192

Contrary to what he says, I can most certainly see some IR remotes. Not super bright but enough to notice. Same goes for the IR lights in my Kinect.

"The original version of this article stated that IR LEDs operate from 300-325THz (about 920-980nm), wavelengths that are invisible. Quite a few readers wrote to say that they could in fact just barely see the LEDs in some (or all) of their remotes. Several were kind enough to let me know which remotes these were, and I was able to test several on a spectrometer. Lo and behold, these remotes were using higher-frequen…

Interesting. I had not read the footnotes. They should update the actual post rather than simply amending it in the footnotes.

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

#367

Post by YSFEJ4SWJUVU6 » Wed, Aug 30, 2017, 2:18 PM UTC

daveheq wrote: post #351

Funny that the author says we haven't found any such people in the past 100 years of testing with truly exceptional hearing, such as a greatly extended hearing range, so they probably don't exist, yet I was tested at around 13 as having 33KHz upper range, which allowed me to hear a beetle walking over leaves and grass in a basement window sill at about 20 feet away... Unfortunately I lost a lot of hearing through con…

Your describing of “MP3” as a level of quality doesn't really give credence to your claim.

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

#368

Post by soundwave106 » Wed, Aug 30, 2017, 2:26 PM UTC

5zBFyURxgY wrote: post #300

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #190

Not entirely silly. Yes, the purported benefits of this high-fidelity audio are imaginary or even include undesirable traits. However, when most "remasters" of pop music today involve the dynamics being boosted to "loudness wars" standards for a target audience of people listening to the music through earbuds in the street, the 24/192 downloads or SACD releases are often the only way to hear the album with real dynam…

Still very silly IMAO. Very, very few recordings are done in 24/192 because of the many implications this has on your entire studio setup. You'll need an exceptional good clock to start with, and all other equipment needs to align to that clock. Then all plugins/processing you use needs to be in the same 24/192 domain, otherwise your signal is reduced to the limit of that plugin/processing and all previous efforts ar…

This depends on whether you are in the studio or are just playing back things.

In the studio, I would say that 24 bit at least should be the norm for recording purposes.

24 bit recording gives you very noticeable increased headroom (about 20dB). This gives you quite a bit more flexibility recording lower levels without concerning yourself about the noise floor. The difference isn't huge for most prosumer setups in practice, but given that the processing power and storage power of computers makes recording in 24 bit trivial to do, there really is no reason not to record 24 bit these days IMHO.

Sample rate also comes into play, mainly if you have older plugins that do not oversample. Some of the mathematical calculations involved, particularly if they are quickly responding to audio changes (eg limiting / compression, distortion), or are using "naive" aliasing-prone algorithms (eg naive sawtooth wave vs. something like BLEP / PolyBLEP etc.), can introduce frequencies beyond the Nyquist that may translate into aliasing. These days, I would say most plugins do oversample internally or at the very least give you the option to do so. There's also a VST wrapper to over-sample older plugins as well (http://www.experimentalscene.com/software/antialias/). So I do not think recording over 44.1kHz is very necessary these days. I don't discount opinions from people that recording at 192kHz "sounds better", though, given the possibility that they are using plugins that are prone to aliasing at 44.1kHz rates.

I personally do not see any benefit of 16/44.1kHz for playback most recordings. Maybe 24 bit would be useful for heavily dynamic music (one of the few categories where you generally find this is orchestral music), but I'm thinking even for here the 96dB range of 16 bit audio should be enough for most cases.

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

#369

Post by anentropic » Wed, Aug 30, 2017, 2:38 PM UTC

rplst8 wrote: post #339

anentropic wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is roughly what the "Mastered for iTunes" badge means on iTunes downloads the mastering engineer has to be approved and there are some minimum dynamic range standards also 24 bit (but not 192khz) master files have to be supplied reportedly some of the streaming services (Spotify, YouTube) are now applying some 'loudness normalisation' which will bring some of the bad loud masters into line (it won't restore thei…

Mastering for "high fidelity" 24-bit audio on iTunes is an oxymoron. The compression algorithms used for AAC and MP3 are going to the worsen the sound quality in a manner that renders the extended dynamic range of 24-bit audio is useless.

even on mp3s where the bitrate is low enough to hear some compression artefacts you would still be able to perceive the difference in dynamic range

and the iTunes files are 256 kbps AACs, you can't hear the compression

remember that 'compression' in this context is data compression and not audio compression (which acts directly on the dynamic range of the source)

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

#370

Post by stephen_g » Wed, Aug 30, 2017, 2:45 PM 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.

He specifically addresses audio engineering (which can be interpolated to DJing and remixing). As he says, what you need in that case is 24bit audio to have more dynamic range to play with. >48kHz is still useless to human hearing.

This particular article doesn't touch on compression as well, which is probably the biggest thing for remixing or DJing. You really want uncompressed or at least high-bitrate AAC.