24/192 Music Downloads ...and why they make no sense

[infuzion]

192kHz digital music files offer no benefits. They're not quite neutral either; practical fidelity is slightly worse. The ultrasonics are a liability during playback.

Neither audio transducers nor power amplifiers are free of distortion, and distortion tends to increase rapidly at the lowest and highest frequencies....

Sampling rates over 48kHz are irrelevant to high fidelity audio data, but they are internally essential to several modern digital audio techniques. Oversampling is the most relevant example [7].

Oversampling is simple and clever. You may recall from my A Digital Media Primer for Geeks that high sampling rates provide a great deal more space between the highest frequency audio we care about (20kHz) and the Nyquist frequency (half the sampling rate). This allows for simpler, smoother, more reliable analog anti-aliasing filters, and thus higher fidelity. This extra space between is 20kHz and the Nyquist frequency is essentially just spectral padding for the analog filter.

...What about 16 bit vs. 24 bit audio?

It's true that 16 bit linear PCM audio does not quite cover the entire theoretical dynamic range of the human ear in ideal conditions. Also, there are (and always will be) reasons to use more than 16 bits in recording and production.

None of that is relevant to playback; here 24 bit audio is as useless as 192kHz sampling. The good news is that at least 24 bit depth doesn't harm fidelity. It just doesn't help, and also wastes space.

http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

& if you want to geek out more: http://wiki.xiph.org/Digital_Show_and_Tell/Episode_02
Thanks to http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/02/ ... tal-audio/

[tester]

I don't know who wrote that article, but definately not a person with deeper sound engineering practice.

There are totally different problems to cover.

[MyCo]

I disagree with that article!!!

Higher samplerates introduce higher precission in low freqencies... just calculate yourself:

50Hz @ 48kHz = 960 Samples
50Hz @ 192kHz = 3840 Samples

Now render a pure sinewave with 960 samples... There is a lot of aliasing caused just by rounding! Now consider low Bitrates, and this aliasing gets worse. Next thing to consider: At the time where 44.1kHz or even 48kHz were standard, the converters had filters on the output rated for this frequency. Now as the Codecs get better and support higher samplingrates, the output filters are rated a lot higher. On most Codecs there isn't even a lowpass on the output anymore! They only have decoupling caps... which is the cheapest highpass you can get.

This means: All you digital data is processed and filtered digital (at sampling rate or even way beyond that), then converted into analog, and there is no analog post processing filtering anymore! So you can say, that you can hear almost digital data!

[trogluddite]

But "good" isn't just about the technical spec''s - in the studio is one thing, but for consumer downloads it is another matter entirely.

What is the typical playback system for music downloads? In what environment are they typically played?

Less than a tiny fraction of 1% of people have a playback system that is of anything like the resolution or low THD to make the massive increase in bandwidth justified. And by bandwidth, I mean broadband that in most areas is already way below the ridiculously optimistic broadband speeds that the advertisers would have us believe.
Higher fidelilty downloads just promote ever more bottlenecks in the internet, and has a cost in terms not only of infrastructure, but also energy consumption.

And it isn't going to stop the majority of music releases being a pile of inane repetitive rubbish - give me low-res music that is inventive and creative over yet another format re-re-re-re-release of the same tired old back-catalogue any day of the week!

[tester]

...but that 1% of people is more important than the rest of 99%. Otherwise - maybe we should stay with 22kHz MP3 at 64kbps? It's enough for acceptable playback, isn't it? Plus - sound perception goes beyond ears. You don't notice the difference without having a reference, but if you have the reference - usually you never look back.

In video systems, long time ago - PAL/NTSC resolution was a standard, and HD - what for HD? Now - the HD 1920x1280 slowly fades out, because 4k is on the horizon. I don't know if you watched the old Star Trek: The Next Generation, and the new - remastered and updated to HD edition.

[trogluddite]

...but that 1% of people is more important than the rest of 99%

"More important" in what sense? A higher fidelity audio system is not going to cure the world's political problems or provide healthcare to the millions who cannot access it.

I am not saying that higher fidelity should not be available to those who have a real requirement for it - for example, for purposes of research into possible medical uses of sound, of course should be encouraged. But the limiting factor for most consumers of music is usually environmental or economic rather than anything intrinsic to the currently available technology.

But my (possibly incorrect!) reading of the context here, is that the large corporate bodies of the music industry merely wish to foist yet another format upon consumers who lack the training to understand that their everyday experience of music will not be improved to any great extent. As with CD, the investment will be in technology rather than the encouragement of musical innovation.

As for the video argument - no I don't buy it at all.
It has not improved the content, only the "gift wrap". The advances in resolution and CGI have not enhanced the emotional range or coverage of controversial subjects in any way at all that I can see - from my UK perspective, I would say precisely the opposite. For example, documentaries now explore their subjects in a far less thorough fashion - preferring to endlessly repeat a handful of sensationalist cliches while the budget is spent on uninformative CGI instead of real journalism.
It is precisely because the content has become so overwhelmingly vacuous that I no longer possess a TV.

And Star Trek - no IMHO it has not improved. The original series was truly innovative - a Russian and Chinese sharing a spacecraft with Americans at the height of the Cold War - a black woman in a position of responsibility on the bridge, at a time when race was the most contentious domestic issue in the USA. The scenery and costumes may have been tacky, but that was very brave film-making for its era, so soon after McCarthy's purges of Hollywood. Now it's themes and motifs are indistinguishable from any other "space opera" - hell, they even still portray space craft as emitting audible sound as they swoop through the vacuum - and far too loudly if my recent experiences of the cinema are any kind of indication!

Similarly the depiction of the macabre aspects of warfare can be more viscerally portrayed - but what widely distributed film has tried to show the experience of the people in eastern Europe who suffered at the hand both of the Nazis and Stalinism? Very few - all this technological "progress" has not changed the USA/UK centred point of view that ignores the fact that 90% of the fighting and suffering in Europe occurred on the Eastern front.

At the end of the day, either we choose to suspend disbelief and immerse ourselves in the story, or we don't - just as we would conjure an image in our mind's eye when reading a good book. If we wish to engage our imaginations, then the artifice of the "special effects" or visible pixellation becomes irrelevant - our minds have ample power to fill in the details.
First time I saw "Bambi" as a little kid, it made me cry; over a hand painted strip of celluloid - the emotional engagement is in the content much, much more than in the presentation.

For me, the true power of new technology is in the way that it opens channels for collaboration, and puts creativity in the hands of anyone with a PC at their disposal - creating possibilities for cross-fertilisation and innovation. It surely produces much dross too - but it allows the artist not "conventional" enough to access the corporate media an outlet for expression that is accessible to anyone curious enough to seek it out.
New content and new ideas - not just a clearer pair of rose-tinted spectacles.

(and there are some truly ugly people on TV sometimes - i really have no desire to see them in greater detail! )

Rant ends.

[MyCo]

Jesus! What a bullshit, it's no wonder, that you don't have time for projects, when you spend so much time on writings stuff, that's not related in any way to the topic.

And no, most of us, that have a PC newer than 2009 or an iPad or an iPhone or any modern Mobile already have playback capabilities that are in the range that is discussed in this thread. So 1% is absolutely wrong!!!

[tester]

Why 1% is more important? Because I'm in that 1% !!!
Aesthetics (and level of flexibility) of sound matters.

Boolean explanation: Y = 100%. Y covers A = 1% and B = 99%.
A covers A and B. B covers only B. Schematic please

Regarding TNG - I look at these old videos and new ones, and no longer want to watch the old ones. Oh, and I don't like TOS, to be more precise. But what I do like in Star Trek in general are these vibrant colors, flashing lights, whooshing sounds and bright cleanness of starships, and maybe this a bit naive but yet explorative starfleed structure and philosophy. "To explore - strange new worlds...".

p.s.: 1% is the symbolic percentage of the market. Go to bandcamp and see how many albums are in greater resolution than 44.1kHz/16bit.

[trogluddite]

Why 1% is more important? Because I'm in that 1% !!!

Good answer!!

And sorry for going on a bit - as you probably guessed, crap TV is one of my pet peeves (though not as much as mobile phones - don't even get me started on that!!).

[infuzion]

As far as studio work goes, yes higher bits & bitrate do help.

But for 99% of the consumer market, even above average people can't tell the difference. There already is a test:
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/0 ... iment.html
Consider that Jeff's audience is above average; computer geeks, people who (want to) create "startup" businesses, etc. I'm sure that some who voted will have higher than average audio equipment also.

& sorry I disagree with you MyCo, I don't think iPhones5 & new laptops have that great of DA converters... Perhaps better yes, but not audiophile quality.