22 ms·

24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012)

295 points by zpiman 8y ago

turdnagel 8y ago
Should this have a (2012) tag? Neil Young did end up releasing music in this format with his Pono player, which failed[0]. [0]: http://www.noise11.com/news/r-i-p-pono-neil-young-kills-off-his-digital-player-20170423 http://www.noise11.com/news/r-i-p-pono-neil-young-kills-off-...
- mark-r 8y ago
  Yes, this has been their position for many years. The associated video is good too: https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
- floatingatoll 8y ago
  Footer of the page suggests 2024, not 2012, as the latest edit date. You can ask the mods to add it by emailing them (link in HN footer).
  - floatingatoll 8y ago
    2014, sigh.
- Applejinx 8y ago
  It did fail, but note that it did sound freaking awesome. I have one. The thing rivals all the rest of my studio gear which includes a Lavry Black and a MOTU 16A capable of 24/192k (which doesn't actually sound better than the Black, but does spec better) The Pono is kind of 'polite' sounding, and possibly not the most mastering-grade accurate playback compared to far more expensive DACs, but by God it sounds good. If you come across any at pennies on the dollar you'd be a fool to not snap them up, it's an extraordinary little piece of tech. (if you do and you don't want them, give 'em to me!)
- classichasclass 8y ago
  Oh, golly, that hot yellow mess. I bought one and it's still in a desk drawer somewhere. The audio sounded great, but the device itself was rather dire. Here's my notes on it at the time: https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2015/01/and-now-for-something-completely.html https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2015/01/and-now-for-somethin...
pointe 8y ago
Title should have [2012]
mruts 8y ago
Problem with music sounding bad doesn’t really have much to do with the distributed format: V0, V1, or 320 mp3s should sound pretty much the same compared to 16-bit flac. You can only the difference between mp3 and flac at shitty bitrates no one uses anymore (like 120). The reason why a lot of recent digital music sounds bad is because of the intentionally terrible mastering. Since everyone is listening of crappy earbuds, they compress the hell out of it and destroy all dynamic range. This is why when downloading music you should avoid remasters (there are some exceptions, like the Beatles mono and stereo boxed sets that came out awhile ago) and go for the first edition presses. This is also why modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital: they are mastered differently since its assumed everyone is going to be listening on good equipment. That being said, I think flac is generally a good choice for a music collection. You can’t transcode mp3s without killing the quality so if you ever want to convert formats (like for a mp3 player), you should stick with flac (16-bit, 48hz). The original idea of 24-bit 192hz flac was for vinyl rips, where hypothetically you might be getting more information.
- martin_a 8y ago
  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" music like in "I got some files here on my drive" seems dead to me. That obviously has downsides but I feel lucky to use Spotify these days and being able to discover new music every day and listen to all of it on the go without buying something, converting it and more.
  - mark-r 8y ago
    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.
Mediterraneo10 8y ago
Thanks to this article, when I torrent music that is shared in 24/192 format, I always resample to 24/96: ffmpeg -i foo.flac -ar 96000 -acodec flac bar.flac
- vortico 8y ago
  To thank the article even more, you could resample to 16/48kHz.
  - Mediterraneo10 8y ago
    Even if the lower sample rate of 48kHz would be entirely reasonable and 96kHz is overkill, 24 bits still makes an audible difference for the material I listen to (modernist classical music and ECM jazz), which is why you can find 24/48 from some labels. For pop music, which of course is distinguished by little dynamic range, then 16 bits would be fine just like on the CD format.
    - vortico 8y ago
      The only issue with low bitrates is noise floor, so if you're hearing other distortions, it's not caused by the bitrate but maybe your room treatment or headphone drivers. A recording would have to have a hilariously large amount of headroom for 16-bit noise floor to be noticible when the music is played at a desired level, and while symphonic and jazz recordings have ridiculously high dynamic range, it's not 100dB of headroom, maybe 60, so 16-bit should be fine. If you still think it's a problem, adding good dithering with ffmpeg's quantizer/resampler flags will make the noise floor 6-10dB smaller.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - andybak 8y ago
      > 24 bits still makes an audible difference The article (and numerous other sources I've seen over the years) disagrees with you so I'm curious why you're so certain?
deevious 8y ago
This reminds me of Monty's A Digital Media Primer for Geeks[0] and Digital Show & Tell[1] - the delivery, the explanations and the way the experiments are set up is superb. [0] https://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml https://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml [1] https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
- tialaramex 8y ago
  The use of analogue gear in #2 is one of those things that as someone who _already believed what Monty is showing here_ I wouldn't have thought to do. But it really heads off a bunch of arguments. And twenty years from now it's going to be hard because you'll have to scrounge the gear from a museum instead of it being available for a reasonable price from eBay or borrowing it off somebody who kept it in the cupboard after upgrading to modern digital gear. So I'm glad Monty did it in that era where the gear was still available.
  - blattimwind 8y ago
    Honestly it is remarkable how many engineers (self-proclaimed or otherwise) in audio don't understand the basics of sampled systems and quantization. You'd think that anyone making broad claims about these kinds of systems would have at least a rough understanding of the foundational principles, but no.
- teknico 8y ago
  The article's author, Chris "Monty" Montgomery, is one of the authors of Ogg Vorbis [1] and Opus [2]. It puzzles me that many people don't yet know about Opus. Let me quote the FAQ [3]: "Does Opus make all those other lossy codecs obsolete? Yes. From a technical point of view (loss, delay, bitrates, ...) Opus renders Speex obsolete and should also replace Vorbis and the common proprietary codecs too (e.g. AAC, MP3, ...)." [1] https://xiph.org/vorbis/ https://xiph.org/vorbis/ [2] http://www.opus-codec.org/comparison/ http://www.opus-codec.org/comparison/ [3] https://wiki.xiph.org/OpusFAQ#Does_Opus_make_all_those_other_lossy_codecs_obsolete.3F https://wiki.xiph.org/OpusFAQ#Does_Opus_make_all_those_other...
PascLeRasc 8y ago
I 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 subjective terms like "warm", "lush", "wide soundstage" - not "unexpected 14.5kHz falloff". I don't go to a restaurant and demand to see pH tests or measure the temperature of my steak myself. I'm not going to do blind A/B listening tests because I don't care about that. If you told me you liked one wine, would it be appropriate for me to say "No you didn't. You don't have taste buds that can tell the difference between that and any other wine."? Of course not. Music is an entirely subjective experience and trying to distill it down to data is both condescending and telling of how little an author cares about music. Even if you don't care about subjective experiences of audio, why are you so bothered by letting people like what they like? How does it affect your life that I listen to music encoded at 24/196? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlCG2fK-abo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlCG2fK-abo
- newaccoutnas 8y ago
  Umm, Nyquist-Shannon Theory? Listening to 24Bit 192Khz can actually damage the cillia in your ear
  - IWeldMelons 8y ago
    Bingo! Exactly, Nyquist theory. But no one can make a truly good, brickwall filter at this frequency. It is much easier to make a lot less steep frequency response, whilch would start at 22 khz and would slowly go down all the way to 96 kHz. By the way, how would it damage the ears if it was thoroughly filtered?
    - blattimwind 8y ago
      Except that audio DACs are generally oversampling; for example, an output filter for the AD1955 DAC is only needed to reach -3 dB at 100 kHz, even if you are feeding it a 48 kHz PCM signal. This allows these DACs to produce essentially zero energy in the frequency band from Nyquist cutoff of the input signal to filter cutoff.
teknico 8y ago
Already discussed. Main posts: [2012] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3668310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3668310 [2014] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8689231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8689231 [2015] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10520639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10520639 [2017] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15127633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15127633
- diminish 8y ago
  It's a very good article which shows up again and again. Think it's 2040, singularity reached. AI runs the world and on HN we have this article popping up very frequently like every hundred Planck time unit .
  - amrrs 8y ago
    Could it be also because HN Front page algorithm (my speculation) of favoring domains (with something like Domain Authority) based on previous votes?
    - dang 8y ago
      No. Some domains are penalized because of too many lightweight or off-topic posts, but no domains get a boost.
  - xoa 8y ago
    It is a good article, and since the misunderstandings are persistent in the same way a lot of other commercially exploited mysticism is it remains a relevant one as well. Having said that and to try to add on something new to these discussions, since you brought up this: >Think it's 2040, singularity reached. AI runs the world and on HN we have this article popping up very frequently like every hundred Planck time unit. One argument I can see in principle for 24/192+ sound (not music) recordings would be if someone was a serious transhumanist and honestly did anticipate that some humans will move beyond baseline human sensory limitations in the foreseeable future (by 2040 would certainly count). Combine that with the sort of incredible environmental destruction we're seeing right now, with enormous numbers of species going extinct, forests being destroyed, insect/bird levels plummeting/moving even if they aren't going extinct entirely, etc. It doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to imagine that in 2040 somebody with genetically enhanced or bionic ears who really could hear ultrasonics (and had grown up with that, so their brain had developed from the start with that input) would find themselves not being able to ever hear "what it was really like" back in the 2010s even for a simple walk in the woods. If they had been here in person they'd be able to hear all sorts of things, but our standard recordings wouldn't have any of that, and in that time the whole character of forests may be different forever ala the silent spring. It's similar I think to one of the obvious guiding principles of modern archaeology, which is to try to disturb as little as possible precisely because we recognize there will be superior tools and sensors in the future which could pick up things we can't right now. Saving as much raw data as feasible in many experiments is also like that, even if we can't process it all now decades down the line new insights might be found. None of that has anything to do with music which is a subjective human artistic creation. Even though instruments give off sounds beyond our perception, by definition we aren't taking those sounds into account in the creative process. Future transhumans would undoubtedly create transhumanist art taking full advantage of any enhanced senses, but that wouldn't apply retroactively.
aidenn0 8y ago
The 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 cross points.
- SamWhited 8y ago
  yup; from the piece: "An engineer also requires more than 16 bits during mixing and mastering"
- vortico 8y ago
  Yes, adding any sort of nonlinear distortion to audio will make frequencies depend on other frequencies, i.e. audible frequencies in the output of an effect can depend on supersonic frequencies in its input. For example, if you add a 100 kHz sine wave through a high-gain guitar amplifier, you'll definitely be able to hear it. I didn't really see a mention of this point in the article since there was no "So when do you need 192 kHz?" section, but in its defense, DACs, amplifiers, speakers, and room ambiance are all incredibly linear in 2019, so for music listening, most super-sonic frequency content doesn't turn into to lower frequencies. It does matter when you're using the very nonlinear Apple earbuds, but if you were doing that, you wouldn't care about audio quality in the first place.
  - sjwright 8y ago
    He mentions this in the section "192kHz considered harmful" without the misleading rubbishing of Apple earbuds (which are among the best regular earbuds on the market, for what it's worth). In most sensible systems, super-sonic content should be filtered out before it has a chance of doing nothing other than risking the fidelity of the final output. As for your quip about a 100 kHz sine wave sent through a guitar amp, what you'd be able to hear are the distortions and subharmonics which are below 20 kHz—and if they're desirable in the recording they would need to be captured as their sub-20 kHz components. Capturing the >20 kHz components will do nothing but make the sound wildly and randomly inconsistent depending on the consumer's system.
perfmode 8y ago
My favorite music these days is left-field and lo-fi hip hop. High-fidelity is pretty irrelevant. Music is produced, mixed, and mastered at home. e.g. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/earl-sweatshirt-some-rap-songs/ https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/earl-sweatshirt-some-ra...
pjc50 8y ago
The choice of colour analogy is unfortunate, because there really are colours that are "out of gamut" and cannot be accurately reproduced on normal monitors. If you have the opportunity to and look at one of the IKB works in person you'll see what I mean. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/klein-ikb-79-t01513 https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/klein-ikb-79-t01513 https://contemporaryartetc.wordpress.com/2007/09/13/fact-of-the-day-61/ https://contemporaryartetc.wordpress.com/2007/09/13/fact-of-...
- themodelplumber 8y ago
  Those are very nice examples. I always fell back on "go stare at the sun for a while for a shot of color that your monitor can't handle" but admittedly it was pure laziness.
- xoa 8y ago
  I don't quite agree with you, taking into account it's an analogy designed to help illustrate the issue for general audiences. It's not as if we don't have ProPhoto RGB or other wide gamuts or don't understand the issues of rendition accuracy and resolution within the visual spectrum. There was never any debate that sRGB alone in particular was quite limited, or that dynamic range was an issue. It's just that it represents a ton more data and is technologically and commercially much, much harder. As tech has caught up displays have continued to chase human visual limits, starting with resolution, then frame rate, and finally major industry wide improvements to gamut and range with BT.2020/2100. I mean heck, it wasn't that long ago that we barely had color at all. I still remember well the first 8-bit system I ever got, or back when I regularly had to manually change between 16-color/256/16k to prioritize resolution or color because my system just didn't have enough VRAM to handle both at once. Audio did far better at matching human limits much, much longer ago. But within the visual spectrum but not showing on the screen is still within the visual spectrum. The article examples refer to infrared and UV+ for contrast, and that's entirely correct. Monitors displaying either of those would make no difference (well, beaming ionizing EM at your face raises significant concerns audio doesn't at any level) at any point. They're simply beyond human eyes period. It's an accurate analogy. Failing to reproduce something within human limits would be what you're talking about, but that's a solved problem and not something 24/192 offers you anything with.
gpjanik 8y ago
I wonder about one thing. Sure you can't hear above/under certain frequencies, but these frequencies still resonate with parts of your body (that are not ears) and you might feel it in other ways than just hearing, and also their presence generates harmonics. Not sure if it is observable to a human, but just because you don't hear N hertz, doesn't mean you can't hear its harmonics/it doesn't affect your _perception_ of the rest of the signal at all. Cutting off some frequencies can create patterns that are not hearable per se, but might induce unwanted sensory feelings (*opinion, not a fact). I think using physics to break this down doesn't make much sense, and that the most practical debate solution would be to do a double-blind test on a statistical group of the so called audiophiles.
mixmastamyk 8y ago
TL;DR: 24/192 is useful at the mastering stage, to avoid error creep from mixing and effects. This is way beyond human hearing however, so scaling down to 16/44.1 (CD quality) in the final mix for playback won't result in noticeable degradation. CD quality was chosen on principles of human limits. Perhaps we could give a bit of extra headroom for kicks, to widen the envelope at extremes however. A useful amount would look more like 20/48 rather than quadruple or sextuple the resolution. No one produces in this format though, the next one up is typically 24/96.
- mywittyname 8y ago
  Like how banks keep track of fractional pennies when calculating interest, because rounding them off at time of calculation would introduce cumulative error. Instead, they round them off at payment time.
  - mixmastamyk 8y ago
    Yes, as done in an image compositing pipelines as well, with higher resolutions and bits per pixel of color information until final output.
tohnjitor 8y ago
High resolution audio is important to me as a sound designer because of the ability to severely slow down a piece of audio without any aliasing or stuttering. At 96KHz and higher with certain samples I can slow down by 80% and it will still sound good.
- ZoomZoomZoom 8y ago
  Do you mean slowing down while lowering pitch (without resampling)? If so, you're correct, as you bring harmonics from out of limit of human hearing back and the result sounds natural. But if you mean just changing the speed of the sound, than you need to change the algorithm you're using. There should be no difference in quality due to sources having different sample rates.
jmull 8y ago
Just to be a Devil's advocate (just a little)... Sure, 24/192 doesn't physically improve the sound you are able perceive when listening to it. But listening to music is a highly subjective emotional experience. If a listener cares about getting the best possible quality listening experience and feels downloading 24/192 music will achieve that, then the listener will actually enjoy music more knowing it is playing from a 24/192 source. Listening to music is all about the feels. Of course, I get how this can be abused. Next thing you know someone will be selling 32/320 for twice as much, then 64/480 for three times as much, etc. Not that this kind of article isn't still really important. It is. It provides a lot of reassurance to audiophiles that they can enjoy their music to the maximum without buying into the 24/192 hype. And that's what it's really all about: the best enjoyment of the music.
- aw3c2 8y ago
  And like homeopathy, this should be scrutinized scientifically. There is nothing wrong with eating tiny bits of sugared balls, but don't tell others they are somehow of special powers.
gregf 8y ago
I store stuff in flac, i got a large nas at my house. Then i can down convert to any other format I might need. I enjoy the flacs when I'm home.
lfmunoz4 8y ago
author doesn't take into account that although you cannot hear above 20khz or below 20hz. That doesn't mean you cannot sense it. Sound after all is just air vibrating, therefore obviously there must be an effect on the body.
jrace 8y ago
This same argument can be made for many things Why have an engine in my car that can exceed all speed limits? Why have a heating and cooling system in my house that can exceed any comfortable level? Why have lights that get brighter than I need? Why have an internet connection that exceeds what I need now? ======== I keep all my music rips in uncompressed FLAC - 1) because i can 2) because I have the most flexibility (transcodes) 3) because it is capable of capturing _more_ signal that the original contains No point in bottlenecking my audio just because _other_ people are unable to appreciate it.
- pslam 8y ago
  > No point in bottlenecking my audio just because _other_ people are unable to appreciate it. The entire point of the post is that _nobody_ can appreciate it. It is entirely a waste of space at best, and a cynical marketing ploy at worst.
- function_seven 8y ago
  Your examples all have good reasons though. > Why have an engine in my car that can exceed all speed limits? So I can drive faster than the speed limit if I want to. (And I do) > Why have a heating and cooling system in my house that can exceed any comfortable level? Well, you shouldn't oversize your HVAC system if you want to save money. But it's nice to be able to achieve your target temp in a reasonable time period. Any system that can heat your house by 10°F in 20 minutes will—as a side effect—also be able to heat it to 90°F if you were to set it there. > Why have lights that get brighter than I need? Other people may need that extra brightness. You can choose dimmer lights if you want. In any case, there's a clear difference between the two choices. > Why have an internet connection that exceeds what I need now? Again, other people may need that extra bandwidth. If you can choose a slower one, then do so. The point of this article is that 24/192 downloads do not improve anything. It's like having a car engine with blue anodized cylinder heads. Nothing about the performance will benefit from the color change of the heads. Or using gold plated ducts for your heating system. The quality of the air is not affected by that. Our ears are not capable of hearing the differences when they affect only frequencies above our range. Imagine if those lights boasted that they rendered 200nm light more faithfully. That improvement is wasted on your eyes.
stevewillows 8y ago
If you use foobar2000, you can use ABX Comparator to compare between various bitrates and formats. Start with a lossless format and convert it. [1] https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_abx https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_abx
KerrickStaley 8y ago
Question: Is 192 kHz better when you want to slow down (or speed up) a track significantly while keeping pitches the same? Does it produce less noticeable artifacts? When DJing, I often speed up or slow down a track I'm cueing in order to match the tempo of the playing song. So having 192 kHz tracks might be better (although usually you try not to change a song's tempo too far from the original anyway).
- pesfandiar 8y ago
  When slowing down the track, you're changing the effective sampling rate (e.g. 192 kHz turns into 96 kHz at half the speed). This article is about regular playback, so in your case it might make sense to have a higher rate.
- penagwin 8y ago
  I personally read the article to be addressing 192 kHz as a consumer of the music, I have a feeling for those producing (or mixing, etc.) it's a bit different. It's kinda like how there's advantages of recording at 8k, better cropping, supersampling, etc. But for the average consumer there's no perceivable difference between the pixel density of 8k footage and 1080p footage on their 7" screen anyway.
  - sickcodebruh 8y ago
    I record and mix metal bands and have stuck with 48 kHz for years like many of the engineers I know. 96 kHz sounded better to my ears last time I checked in the studio (it's been years, maybe I wouldn't notice now that I'm older) but it's not worth the heavier storage and processing impact when nobody is actually going to use my stuff that way. I certainly don't feel limited by working at 48 kHz, either, but the hit to my workflow would be significant. Additionally, a lot of converters start imposing track limits when you go beyond 48 kHz, so that's one more reason to stay put. More important than sample rate is AD/DA quality. I'll trust a new high-end converter at 48 kHz than an old prosumer device at 192 kHz. Plenty of the albums we love as listeners were recorded at 44.1 or 48. Plenty were recorded with absolutely horrendous equipment but played and mixed by professionals who created magic. MANY modern vinyl releases where people brag about superior sound quality are just the CD master in all its 16/44.1 glory remastered for vinyl. Little of it matters when the end result is special.
gwbas1c 8y ago
When I casually researched the upper limit of human hearing, I came across something that mentioned that some people can detect lowpass filtering up to 27khz. That's less than half an octave over the "traditional" 20khz limit. Even the 20khz limit is more of an average then a strict biological limit. It also means that a sampling rate somewhere at 54khz is the "ideal" limit when trying to pick a sampling frequency that is completely transparent to everyone. This is less than half an octave higher than the traditional 44.1khz rate, just 22% more data. That's the thing that really drives me nuts about high sampling rates. The minute improvement really only needs a very slight boost in sampling rates, not 96khz or higher.
- justin66 8y ago
  > When I casually researched the upper limit of human hearing, I came across something that mentioned that some people can detect lowpass filtering up to 27khz. Link?
  - gwbas1c 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range#Humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range#Humans
    - justin66 8y ago
      Thanks. It's wikipedia but there's actually some good stuff there. The important link from that page seems to be: https://asa.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1121/1.2761883 https://asa.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1121/1.2761883 A decade has passed and it would be interesting to know how many people have reproduced the results detailed in the abstract. I gave it a quick read and at first glance it looks like an impressive experiment: Hearing thresholds for pure tones between 16 and 30kHz were measured by an adaptive method. The maximum presentation level at the entrance of the outer ear was about 110dB SPL. To prevent the listeners from detecting subharmonic distortions in the lower frequencies, pink noise was presented as a masker. Even at 28kHz, threshold values were obtained from 3 out of 32 ears. No thresholds were obtained for 30kHz tone. Between 20 and 28kHz, the threshold tended to increase rather gradually, whereas it increased abruptly between 16 and 20kHz.
rurp 8y ago
I 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 media cable was poor quality and/or playing music through the headphone jack is worse quality than radio station airwaves. 2. Spotify was sending back poor quality audio, possibly because I was not on wifi. I'm sure the particulars matter but does anyone have a best guess as to why the quality would be so much worse? I don't really expect mainstream radio stations to serve up the highest quality audio, but maybe my assumptions are way off.
- chubot 8y ago
  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 difference between Amazon music and my own MP3s was not as apparent. Pandora seems to sound "fine", although I seldom play it loud enough to notice. Spotify was the only one where I noticed the quality being notably bad. It's possible it's due to a low bandwidth fallback. And maybe they throttle their own servers at peak times, in addition to detecting the lack of local wi-fi.
  - maldusiecle 8y ago
    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!
- jpalomaki 8y ago
  There's quality setting in app settings, where you can choose the quality. Choices are automatic, low, normal, high very high. I guess "automatic" can adjust the quality based on connection.
ehutch79 8y ago
Please 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.
- TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
  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.
  - Applejinx 8y ago
    Very inadequately. There was a quadrophonic vinyl system that failed commercially, which played back surround speakers using modulation of a 30K carrier tone. You had to use a special (aka 'good') stylus, and it sort of worked. The resulting carrier tones would go from 18 kHz to 45 kHz and the fact that this worked at all is evidence that vinyl goes up that far if you let it: wear will tend to scrub off that information unless it's a high energy transient, in which case there's a big chunk of plastic refusing to be worn off (but you'll dull it).
Ohren 8y ago
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 ?
- teilo 8y ago
  Confirmation bias. If you listened to the same track, but at 44.1/16, and were told it was hi-res, you would have the same reaction.
musicale 8y ago
I'd be happy with CD quality - usually I have more than enough download bandwidth and storage space for it. Apple has had Apple Lossless for years but Apple Music (and the iTunes store) still use(s) lossy compression. Movies are now 4K, but Apple has been stuck on 256Kbps AAC since 2009. :( Though as others have noted CD quality won't improve a terribly mastered recording from the loudness wars.
elihu 8y ago
Storage space is cheap, and we have the ability to record and store music in 24/192 or any other format we want. Even if it's useless to us now, it may be of value some day when our genetically-engineered descendants can hear up to 40khz or when someone invents a direct condenser-microphone-to-brain interface.
dusted 8y ago
Mastering should be done for studio monitors. No, studio monitors do not sound the same, but they are somewhat neutral, they sound somewhat in the same ballpark, which is the point of them to begin with, have a flat frequency response (which does not imply that they "sound flat" just that music mastered for active-subwoofers sound flat). This way, those who wish to hear how the music was intended to sound, will have a somewhat decent chance of coming near to what it sounds like, and people who want other flavours can still simply buy equipment which colors it in the direction they desire.
bronlund 8y ago
This is a good example of the Dunning–Kruger effect. Guy reads some books on a subject and thinks he understands all there is about it and think everybody else is stupid.

295 points by zpiman 8y ago

Should this have a (2012) tag? Neil Young did end up releasing music in this format with his Pono player, which failed[0]. [0]: http://www.noise11.com/news/r-i-p-pono-neil-young-kills-off-his-digital-player-20170423 http://www.noise11.com/news/r-i-p-pono-neil-young-kills-off-...

mark-r 8y ago
Yes, this has been their position for many years. The associated video is good too: https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
floatingatoll 8y ago
Footer of the page suggests 2024, not 2012, as the latest edit date. You can ask the mods to add it by emailing them (link in HN footer).
- floatingatoll 8y ago
  2014, sigh.
Applejinx 8y ago
It did fail, but note that it did sound freaking awesome. I have one. The thing rivals all the rest of my studio gear which includes a Lavry Black and a MOTU 16A capable of 24/192k (which doesn't actually sound better than the Black, but does spec better) The Pono is kind of 'polite' sounding, and possibly not the most mastering-grade accurate playback compared to far more expensive DACs, but by God it sounds good. If you come across any at pennies on the dollar you'd be a fool to not snap them up, it's an extraordinary little piece of tech. (if you do and you don't want them, give 'em to me!)
classichasclass 8y ago
Oh, golly, that hot yellow mess. I bought one and it's still in a desk drawer somewhere. The audio sounded great, but the device itself was rather dire. Here's my notes on it at the time: https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2015/01/and-now-for-something-completely.html https://tenfourfox.blogspot.com/2015/01/and-now-for-somethin...

pointe 8y ago

Title should have [2012]

mruts 8y ago

Problem with music sounding bad doesn’t really have much to do with the distributed format: V0, V1, or 320 mp3s should sound pretty much the same compared to 16-bit flac. You can only the difference between mp3 and flac at shitty bitrates no one uses anymore (like 120). The reason why a lot of recent digital music sounds bad is because of the intentionally terrible mastering. Since everyone is listening of crappy earbuds, they compress the hell out of it and destroy all dynamic range. This is why when downloading music you should avoid remasters (there are some exceptions, like the Beatles mono and stereo boxed sets that came out awhile ago) and go for the first edition presses. This is also why modern vinyl releases sound a lot better than digital: they are mastered differently since its assumed everyone is going to be listening on good equipment. That being said, I think flac is generally a good choice for a music collection. You can’t transcode mp3s without killing the quality so if you ever want to convert formats (like for a mp3 player), you should stick with flac (16-bit, 48hz). The original idea of 24-bit 192hz flac was for vinyl rips, where hypothetically you might be getting more information.

martin_a 8y ago
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" music like in "I got some files here on my drive" seems dead to me. That obviously has downsides but I feel lucky to use Spotify these days and being able to discover new music every day and listen to all of it on the go without buying something, converting it and more.
- mark-r 8y ago
  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.

Mediterraneo10 8y ago

Thanks to this article, when I torrent music that is shared in 24/192 format, I always resample to 24/96: ffmpeg -i foo.flac -ar 96000 -acodec flac bar.flac

vortico 8y ago
To thank the article even more, you could resample to 16/48kHz.
- Mediterraneo10 8y ago
  Even if the lower sample rate of 48kHz would be entirely reasonable and 96kHz is overkill, 24 bits still makes an audible difference for the material I listen to (modernist classical music and ECM jazz), which is why you can find 24/48 from some labels. For pop music, which of course is distinguished by little dynamic range, then 16 bits would be fine just like on the CD format.
  - vortico 8y ago
    The only issue with low bitrates is noise floor, so if you're hearing other distortions, it's not caused by the bitrate but maybe your room treatment or headphone drivers. A recording would have to have a hilariously large amount of headroom for 16-bit noise floor to be noticible when the music is played at a desired level, and while symphonic and jazz recordings have ridiculously high dynamic range, it's not 100dB of headroom, maybe 60, so 16-bit should be fine. If you still think it's a problem, adding good dithering with ffmpeg's quantizer/resampler flags will make the noise floor 6-10dB smaller.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - andybak 8y ago
    > 24 bits still makes an audible difference The article (and numerous other sources I've seen over the years) disagrees with you so I'm curious why you're so certain?

deevious 8y ago

This reminds me of Monty's A Digital Media Primer for Geeks[0] and Digital Show & Tell[1] - the delivery, the explanations and the way the experiments are set up is superb. [0] https://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml https://xiph.org/video/vid1.shtml [1] https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml https://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml

tialaramex 8y ago
The use of analogue gear in #2 is one of those things that as someone who _already believed what Monty is showing here_ I wouldn't have thought to do. But it really heads off a bunch of arguments. And twenty years from now it's going to be hard because you'll have to scrounge the gear from a museum instead of it being available for a reasonable price from eBay or borrowing it off somebody who kept it in the cupboard after upgrading to modern digital gear. So I'm glad Monty did it in that era where the gear was still available.
- blattimwind 8y ago
  Honestly it is remarkable how many engineers (self-proclaimed or otherwise) in audio don't understand the basics of sampled systems and quantization. You'd think that anyone making broad claims about these kinds of systems would have at least a rough understanding of the foundational principles, but no.
teknico 8y ago
The article's author, Chris "Monty" Montgomery, is one of the authors of Ogg Vorbis [1] and Opus [2]. It puzzles me that many people don't yet know about Opus. Let me quote the FAQ [3]: "Does Opus make all those other lossy codecs obsolete? Yes. From a technical point of view (loss, delay, bitrates, ...) Opus renders Speex obsolete and should also replace Vorbis and the common proprietary codecs too (e.g. AAC, MP3, ...)." [1] https://xiph.org/vorbis/ https://xiph.org/vorbis/ [2] http://www.opus-codec.org/comparison/ http://www.opus-codec.org/comparison/ [3] https://wiki.xiph.org/OpusFAQ#Does_Opus_make_all_those_other_lossy_codecs_obsolete.3F https://wiki.xiph.org/OpusFAQ#Does_Opus_make_all_those_other...

PascLeRasc 8y ago

I 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 subjective terms like "warm", "lush", "wide soundstage" - not "unexpected 14.5kHz falloff". I don't go to a restaurant and demand to see pH tests or measure the temperature of my steak myself. I'm not going to do blind A/B listening tests because I don't care about that. If you told me you liked one wine, would it be appropriate for me to say "No you didn't. You don't have taste buds that can tell the difference between that and any other wine."? Of course not. Music is an entirely subjective experience and trying to distill it down to data is both condescending and telling of how little an author cares about music. Even if you don't care about subjective experiences of audio, why are you so bothered by letting people like what they like? How does it affect your life that I listen to music encoded at 24/196? [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlCG2fK-abo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlCG2fK-abo

newaccoutnas 8y ago
Umm, Nyquist-Shannon Theory? Listening to 24Bit 192Khz can actually damage the cillia in your ear
- IWeldMelons 8y ago
  Bingo! Exactly, Nyquist theory. But no one can make a truly good, brickwall filter at this frequency. It is much easier to make a lot less steep frequency response, whilch would start at 22 khz and would slowly go down all the way to 96 kHz. By the way, how would it damage the ears if it was thoroughly filtered?
  - blattimwind 8y ago
    Except that audio DACs are generally oversampling; for example, an output filter for the AD1955 DAC is only needed to reach -3 dB at 100 kHz, even if you are feeding it a 48 kHz PCM signal. This allows these DACs to produce essentially zero energy in the frequency band from Nyquist cutoff of the input signal to filter cutoff.

teknico 8y ago

Already discussed. Main posts: [2012] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3668310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3668310 [2014] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8689231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8689231 [2015] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10520639 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10520639 [2017] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15127633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15127633

diminish 8y ago
It's a very good article which shows up again and again. Think it's 2040, singularity reached. AI runs the world and on HN we have this article popping up very frequently like every hundred Planck time unit .
- amrrs 8y ago
  Could it be also because HN Front page algorithm (my speculation) of favoring domains (with something like Domain Authority) based on previous votes?
  - dang 8y ago
    No. Some domains are penalized because of too many lightweight or off-topic posts, but no domains get a boost.
- xoa 8y ago
  It is a good article, and since the misunderstandings are persistent in the same way a lot of other commercially exploited mysticism is it remains a relevant one as well. Having said that and to try to add on something new to these discussions, since you brought up this: >Think it's 2040, singularity reached. AI runs the world and on HN we have this article popping up very frequently like every hundred Planck time unit. One argument I can see in principle for 24/192+ sound (not music) recordings would be if someone was a serious transhumanist and honestly did anticipate that some humans will move beyond baseline human sensory limitations in the foreseeable future (by 2040 would certainly count). Combine that with the sort of incredible environmental destruction we're seeing right now, with enormous numbers of species going extinct, forests being destroyed, insect/bird levels plummeting/moving even if they aren't going extinct entirely, etc. It doesn't seem entirely unreasonable to imagine that in 2040 somebody with genetically enhanced or bionic ears who really could hear ultrasonics (and had grown up with that, so their brain had developed from the start with that input) would find themselves not being able to ever hear "what it was really like" back in the 2010s even for a simple walk in the woods. If they had been here in person they'd be able to hear all sorts of things, but our standard recordings wouldn't have any of that, and in that time the whole character of forests may be different forever ala the silent spring. It's similar I think to one of the obvious guiding principles of modern archaeology, which is to try to disturb as little as possible precisely because we recognize there will be superior tools and sensors in the future which could pick up things we can't right now. Saving as much raw data as feasible in many experiments is also like that, even if we can't process it all now decades down the line new insights might be found. None of that has anything to do with music which is a subjective human artistic creation. Even though instruments give off sounds beyond our perception, by definition we aren't taking those sounds into account in the creative process. Future transhumans would undoubtedly create transhumanist art taking full advantage of any enhanced senses, but that wouldn't apply retroactively.

aidenn0 8y ago

The 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 cross points.

SamWhited 8y ago
yup; from the piece: "An engineer also requires more than 16 bits during mixing and mastering"
vortico 8y ago
Yes, adding any sort of nonlinear distortion to audio will make frequencies depend on other frequencies, i.e. audible frequencies in the output of an effect can depend on supersonic frequencies in its input. For example, if you add a 100 kHz sine wave through a high-gain guitar amplifier, you'll definitely be able to hear it. I didn't really see a mention of this point in the article since there was no "So when do you need 192 kHz?" section, but in its defense, DACs, amplifiers, speakers, and room ambiance are all incredibly linear in 2019, so for music listening, most super-sonic frequency content doesn't turn into to lower frequencies. It does matter when you're using the very nonlinear Apple earbuds, but if you were doing that, you wouldn't care about audio quality in the first place.
- sjwright 8y ago
  He mentions this in the section "192kHz considered harmful" without the misleading rubbishing of Apple earbuds (which are among the best regular earbuds on the market, for what it's worth). In most sensible systems, super-sonic content should be filtered out before it has a chance of doing nothing other than risking the fidelity of the final output. As for your quip about a 100 kHz sine wave sent through a guitar amp, what you'd be able to hear are the distortions and subharmonics which are below 20 kHz—and if they're desirable in the recording they would need to be captured as their sub-20 kHz components. Capturing the >20 kHz components will do nothing but make the sound wildly and randomly inconsistent depending on the consumer's system.

perfmode 8y ago

My favorite music these days is left-field and lo-fi hip hop. High-fidelity is pretty irrelevant. Music is produced, mixed, and mastered at home. e.g. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/earl-sweatshirt-some-rap-songs/ https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/earl-sweatshirt-some-ra...

pjc50 8y ago

The choice of colour analogy is unfortunate, because there really are colours that are "out of gamut" and cannot be accurately reproduced on normal monitors. If you have the opportunity to and look at one of the IKB works in person you'll see what I mean. https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/klein-ikb-79-t01513 https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/klein-ikb-79-t01513 https://contemporaryartetc.wordpress.com/2007/09/13/fact-of-the-day-61/ https://contemporaryartetc.wordpress.com/2007/09/13/fact-of-...

themodelplumber 8y ago
Those are very nice examples. I always fell back on "go stare at the sun for a while for a shot of color that your monitor can't handle" but admittedly it was pure laziness.
xoa 8y ago
I don't quite agree with you, taking into account it's an analogy designed to help illustrate the issue for general audiences. It's not as if we don't have ProPhoto RGB or other wide gamuts or don't understand the issues of rendition accuracy and resolution within the visual spectrum. There was never any debate that sRGB alone in particular was quite limited, or that dynamic range was an issue. It's just that it represents a ton more data and is technologically and commercially much, much harder. As tech has caught up displays have continued to chase human visual limits, starting with resolution, then frame rate, and finally major industry wide improvements to gamut and range with BT.2020/2100. I mean heck, it wasn't that long ago that we barely had color at all. I still remember well the first 8-bit system I ever got, or back when I regularly had to manually change between 16-color/256/16k to prioritize resolution or color because my system just didn't have enough VRAM to handle both at once. Audio did far better at matching human limits much, much longer ago. But within the visual spectrum but not showing on the screen is still within the visual spectrum. The article examples refer to infrared and UV+ for contrast, and that's entirely correct. Monitors displaying either of those would make no difference (well, beaming ionizing EM at your face raises significant concerns audio doesn't at any level) at any point. They're simply beyond human eyes period. It's an accurate analogy. Failing to reproduce something within human limits would be what you're talking about, but that's a solved problem and not something 24/192 offers you anything with.

gpjanik 8y ago

I wonder about one thing. Sure you can't hear above/under certain frequencies, but these frequencies still resonate with parts of your body (that are not ears) and you might feel it in other ways than just hearing, and also their presence generates harmonics. Not sure if it is observable to a human, but just because you don't hear N hertz, doesn't mean you can't hear its harmonics/it doesn't affect your _perception_ of the rest of the signal at all. Cutting off some frequencies can create patterns that are not hearable per se, but might induce unwanted sensory feelings (*opinion, not a fact). I think using physics to break this down doesn't make much sense, and that the most practical debate solution would be to do a double-blind test on a statistical group of the so called audiophiles.

mixmastamyk 8y ago

TL;DR: 24/192 is useful at the mastering stage, to avoid error creep from mixing and effects. This is way beyond human hearing however, so scaling down to 16/44.1 (CD quality) in the final mix for playback won't result in noticeable degradation. CD quality was chosen on principles of human limits. Perhaps we could give a bit of extra headroom for kicks, to widen the envelope at extremes however. A useful amount would look more like 20/48 rather than quadruple or sextuple the resolution. No one produces in this format though, the next one up is typically 24/96.

mywittyname 8y ago
Like how banks keep track of fractional pennies when calculating interest, because rounding them off at time of calculation would introduce cumulative error. Instead, they round them off at payment time.
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  Yes, as done in an image compositing pipelines as well, with higher resolutions and bits per pixel of color information until final output.

tohnjitor 8y ago

High resolution audio is important to me as a sound designer because of the ability to severely slow down a piece of audio without any aliasing or stuttering. At 96KHz and higher with certain samples I can slow down by 80% and it will still sound good.

ZoomZoomZoom 8y ago
Do you mean slowing down while lowering pitch (without resampling)? If so, you're correct, as you bring harmonics from out of limit of human hearing back and the result sounds natural. But if you mean just changing the speed of the sound, than you need to change the algorithm you're using. There should be no difference in quality due to sources having different sample rates.

jmull 8y ago

Just to be a Devil's advocate (just a little)... Sure, 24/192 doesn't physically improve the sound you are able perceive when listening to it. But listening to music is a highly subjective emotional experience. If a listener cares about getting the best possible quality listening experience and feels downloading 24/192 music will achieve that, then the listener will actually enjoy music more knowing it is playing from a 24/192 source. Listening to music is all about the feels. Of course, I get how this can be abused. Next thing you know someone will be selling 32/320 for twice as much, then 64/480 for three times as much, etc. Not that this kind of article isn't still really important. It is. It provides a lot of reassurance to audiophiles that they can enjoy their music to the maximum without buying into the 24/192 hype. And that's what it's really all about: the best enjoyment of the music.

aw3c2 8y ago
And like homeopathy, this should be scrutinized scientifically. There is nothing wrong with eating tiny bits of sugared balls, but don't tell others they are somehow of special powers.

gregf 8y ago

I store stuff in flac, i got a large nas at my house. Then i can down convert to any other format I might need. I enjoy the flacs when I'm home.

lfmunoz4 8y ago

author doesn't take into account that although you cannot hear above 20khz or below 20hz. That doesn't mean you cannot sense it. Sound after all is just air vibrating, therefore obviously there must be an effect on the body.

jrace 8y ago

This same argument can be made for many things Why have an engine in my car that can exceed all speed limits? Why have a heating and cooling system in my house that can exceed any comfortable level? Why have lights that get brighter than I need? Why have an internet connection that exceeds what I need now? ======== I keep all my music rips in uncompressed FLAC - 1) because i can 2) because I have the most flexibility (transcodes) 3) because it is capable of capturing _more_ signal that the original contains No point in bottlenecking my audio just because _other_ people are unable to appreciate it.

pslam 8y ago
> No point in bottlenecking my audio just because _other_ people are unable to appreciate it. The entire point of the post is that _nobody_ can appreciate it. It is entirely a waste of space at best, and a cynical marketing ploy at worst.
function_seven 8y ago
Your examples all have good reasons though. > Why have an engine in my car that can exceed all speed limits? So I can drive faster than the speed limit if I want to. (And I do) > Why have a heating and cooling system in my house that can exceed any comfortable level? Well, you shouldn't oversize your HVAC system if you want to save money. But it's nice to be able to achieve your target temp in a reasonable time period. Any system that can heat your house by 10°F in 20 minutes will—as a side effect—also be able to heat it to 90°F if you were to set it there. > Why have lights that get brighter than I need? Other people may need that extra brightness. You can choose dimmer lights if you want. In any case, there's a clear difference between the two choices. > Why have an internet connection that exceeds what I need now? Again, other people may need that extra bandwidth. If you can choose a slower one, then do so. The point of this article is that 24/192 downloads do not improve anything. It's like having a car engine with blue anodized cylinder heads. Nothing about the performance will benefit from the color change of the heads. Or using gold plated ducts for your heating system. The quality of the air is not affected by that. Our ears are not capable of hearing the differences when they affect only frequencies above our range. Imagine if those lights boasted that they rendered 200nm light more faithfully. That improvement is wasted on your eyes.

stevewillows 8y ago

If you use foobar2000, you can use ABX Comparator to compare between various bitrates and formats. Start with a lossless format and convert it. [1] https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_abx https://www.foobar2000.org/components/view/foo_abx

KerrickStaley 8y ago

Question: Is 192 kHz better when you want to slow down (or speed up) a track significantly while keeping pitches the same? Does it produce less noticeable artifacts? When DJing, I often speed up or slow down a track I'm cueing in order to match the tempo of the playing song. So having 192 kHz tracks might be better (although usually you try not to change a song's tempo too far from the original anyway).

pesfandiar 8y ago
When slowing down the track, you're changing the effective sampling rate (e.g. 192 kHz turns into 96 kHz at half the speed). This article is about regular playback, so in your case it might make sense to have a higher rate.
penagwin 8y ago
I personally read the article to be addressing 192 kHz as a consumer of the music, I have a feeling for those producing (or mixing, etc.) it's a bit different. It's kinda like how there's advantages of recording at 8k, better cropping, supersampling, etc. But for the average consumer there's no perceivable difference between the pixel density of 8k footage and 1080p footage on their 7" screen anyway.
- sickcodebruh 8y ago
  I record and mix metal bands and have stuck with 48 kHz for years like many of the engineers I know. 96 kHz sounded better to my ears last time I checked in the studio (it's been years, maybe I wouldn't notice now that I'm older) but it's not worth the heavier storage and processing impact when nobody is actually going to use my stuff that way. I certainly don't feel limited by working at 48 kHz, either, but the hit to my workflow would be significant. Additionally, a lot of converters start imposing track limits when you go beyond 48 kHz, so that's one more reason to stay put. More important than sample rate is AD/DA quality. I'll trust a new high-end converter at 48 kHz than an old prosumer device at 192 kHz. Plenty of the albums we love as listeners were recorded at 44.1 or 48. Plenty were recorded with absolutely horrendous equipment but played and mixed by professionals who created magic. MANY modern vinyl releases where people brag about superior sound quality are just the CD master in all its 16/44.1 glory remastered for vinyl. Little of it matters when the end result is special.

gwbas1c 8y ago

When I casually researched the upper limit of human hearing, I came across something that mentioned that some people can detect lowpass filtering up to 27khz. That's less than half an octave over the "traditional" 20khz limit. Even the 20khz limit is more of an average then a strict biological limit. It also means that a sampling rate somewhere at 54khz is the "ideal" limit when trying to pick a sampling frequency that is completely transparent to everyone. This is less than half an octave higher than the traditional 44.1khz rate, just 22% more data. That's the thing that really drives me nuts about high sampling rates. The minute improvement really only needs a very slight boost in sampling rates, not 96khz or higher.

justin66 8y ago
> When I casually researched the upper limit of human hearing, I came across something that mentioned that some people can detect lowpass filtering up to 27khz. Link?
- gwbas1c 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range#Humans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearing_range#Humans
  - justin66 8y ago
    Thanks. It's wikipedia but there's actually some good stuff there. The important link from that page seems to be: https://asa.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1121/1.2761883 https://asa.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1121/1.2761883 A decade has passed and it would be interesting to know how many people have reproduced the results detailed in the abstract. I gave it a quick read and at first glance it looks like an impressive experiment: Hearing thresholds for pure tones between 16 and 30kHz were measured by an adaptive method. The maximum presentation level at the entrance of the outer ear was about 110dB SPL. To prevent the listeners from detecting subharmonic distortions in the lower frequencies, pink noise was presented as a masker. Even at 28kHz, threshold values were obtained from 3 out of 32 ears. No thresholds were obtained for 30kHz tone. Between 20 and 28kHz, the threshold tended to increase rather gradually, whereas it increased abruptly between 16 and 20kHz.

rurp 8y ago

I 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 media cable was poor quality and/or playing music through the headphone jack is worse quality than radio station airwaves. 2. Spotify was sending back poor quality audio, possibly because I was not on wifi. I'm sure the particulars matter but does anyone have a best guess as to why the quality would be so much worse? I don't really expect mainstream radio stations to serve up the highest quality audio, but maybe my assumptions are way off.

chubot 8y ago
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 difference between Amazon music and my own MP3s was not as apparent. Pandora seems to sound "fine", although I seldom play it loud enough to notice. Spotify was the only one where I noticed the quality being notably bad. It's possible it's due to a low bandwidth fallback. And maybe they throttle their own servers at peak times, in addition to detecting the lack of local wi-fi.
- maldusiecle 8y ago
  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!
jpalomaki 8y ago
There's quality setting in app settings, where you can choose the quality. Choices are automatic, low, normal, high very high. I guess "automatic" can adjust the quality based on connection.

ehutch79 8y ago

Please 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.

TheOtherHobbes 8y ago
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.
- Applejinx 8y ago
  Very inadequately. There was a quadrophonic vinyl system that failed commercially, which played back surround speakers using modulation of a 30K carrier tone. You had to use a special (aka 'good') stylus, and it sort of worked. The resulting carrier tones would go from 18 kHz to 45 kHz and the fact that this worked at all is evidence that vinyl goes up that far if you let it: wear will tend to scrub off that information unless it's a high energy transient, in which case there's a big chunk of plastic refusing to be worn off (but you'll dull it).

Ohren 8y ago

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 ?

teilo 8y ago
Confirmation bias. If you listened to the same track, but at 44.1/16, and were told it was hi-res, you would have the same reaction.

musicale 8y ago

I'd be happy with CD quality - usually I have more than enough download bandwidth and storage space for it. Apple has had Apple Lossless for years but Apple Music (and the iTunes store) still use(s) lossy compression. Movies are now 4K, but Apple has been stuck on 256Kbps AAC since 2009. :( Though as others have noted CD quality won't improve a terribly mastered recording from the loudness wars.

elihu 8y ago

Storage space is cheap, and we have the ability to record and store music in 24/192 or any other format we want. Even if it's useless to us now, it may be of value some day when our genetically-engineered descendants can hear up to 40khz or when someone invents a direct condenser-microphone-to-brain interface.

dusted 8y ago

Mastering should be done for studio monitors. No, studio monitors do not sound the same, but they are somewhat neutral, they sound somewhat in the same ballpark, which is the point of them to begin with, have a flat frequency response (which does not imply that they "sound flat" just that music mastered for active-subwoofers sound flat). This way, those who wish to hear how the music was intended to sound, will have a somewhat decent chance of coming near to what it sounds like, and people who want other flavours can still simply buy equipment which colors it in the direction they desire.

bronlund 8y ago

This is a good example of the Dunning–Kruger effect. Guy reads some books on a subject and thinks he understands all there is about it and think everybody else is stupid.