5 ms·

CD quality isn't that good (sample rate is fine, bitrate isn't) and it definitely has compression artifacts at the low end but that's a nitpick. That said, the

by lagadu 7y ago

CD quality isn't that good (sample rate is fine, bitrate isn't) and it definitely has compression artifacts at the low end but that's a nitpick. That said, the biggest problem with the CD is that good CD transports are few and far between and pretty much all CD players have garbage-tier DAC implementations. edit: to be clear, a CD will have far more resolution and technical capacity available than a vinyl ever will, I'm just saying that CDs have their own issues and aren't perfect.

simias 7y ago
You'd have to come up with a good source to convince me that 16bits per sample is not good enough for consumer audio (or that you could tell the difference even in perfect conditions. So might be able to hear it, the vast majority of people won't) but beyond that it doesn't really matter in this discussion because vinyls have a much worse fidelity. If you sample vinyl audio at more than 16bits you'll just be sampling noise anyway. >pretty much all CD players have garbage-tier DAC implementations. A true audiophile I see, anything consumer-grade is "garbage" in order to justify the purchase of ridiculously overpriced equipment. The truth is that it's very cheap to design a decent quality DAC or ADC these days, mainly thanks to digital processing and the fact that those chips are made in huge quantities. Digital filters are high quality these days and the use of oversampling makes it a lot easier to design good analog filters. Audiophiles are very hard to take seriously because the hobby is 95% snake oil and 5% reasonable engineering. I'm sorry if you're part of the 5% and I overreacted but it's one of these hot buttons for me. I've spent so much time arguing with people that, no, it made to mathematical sense to want 32bit samples or 160kHz audio...
- lagadu 7y ago
  > A true audiophile I see, anything consumer-grade is "garbage" in order to justify the purchase of ridiculously overpriced equipment. Actually I'm rather fond of the $80 SDAC and it stands tall among other, more expensive stuff I have (I'm listening to it as type this in fact). It's miles ahead of any CD player DAC. Seriously, a CD transport into a cheap DAC will sound very noticeably better. Admittedly I've only sampled about a dozen or so supposedly good players and eventually lost interest so it's not a big sample pool. I'm with you in that I also agree that it's dumb how most amplitude-signal DACs market "32bit/768khz" despite that sample rate being effectively useless and the noise floor in DS chips being at around ~20 bits worth of resolution and that's a best case scenario. edit: honestly when it comes to amps and dacs, in my experience, there is no spec or measurement that correlates with how good it sounds so with those I pretty much gave up on anything other than my ears.
  - sigmos 7y ago
    I have a thought it’s the composers’ intention to how listeners will hear. There was once I spent a long time tweaking frequencies to my taste, it’s clear we have too many parts to just to get the right pitch and nuance details.
  - Synaesthesia 7y ago
    I don’t think anyone has ever heard the difference between DAC’s in a double blind test.
- guywhocodes 7y ago
  Last I checked it is 14bit. Very long time ago, but I'm very sure it used to be 14 and not sure if it is 16 now. Regardless I'm sure a lot older CDs have a quarter of the fidelity as a result
  - projektfu 7y ago
    "There was a long debate over the use of 14-bit (Philips) or 16-bit (Sony) quantization, and 44,056 or 44,100 samples/s (Sony) or approximately 44,000 samples/s (Philips). When the Sony/Philips task force designed the Compact Disc, Philips had already developed a 14-bit D/A converter (DAC), but Sony insisted on 16-bit. In the end, 16 bits and 44.1 kilosamples per second prevailed. Philips found a way to produce 16-bit quality using its 14-bit DAC by using four times oversampling.[9]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio#Audio_format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio#Aud...
- electrograv 7y ago
  Source: Section 3.5 (page 9) of this peer-reviewed meta-analysis days “it is well known that the dynamic range of human hearing may exceed 100db. Therefore, it is reasonable to speculate that bit depth beyond 16 bits may be perceived.” https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/13493/Reiss%20A%20Meta-Analysis%20of%20High%20Resolution%202016%20Published.pdf https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/134... Additionally, this is purely talking about loudness dynamic range, not even including resolution or JND (just noticeable difference). I will demonstrate to you below how even 20 bits per sample is insufficient in some cases. Imagine for a moment that you could argue that the human hearing threshold of quantization error is only 4 bits (only 16 discrete values!) at the sound level of a pin dropping (10db). Now, I think we can all agree that’s absurd; we need a lot more than just 16 discrete amplitude values to represent the sound of a pin drop indistinguishable from reality to a human ear. But for the moment, let’s be really really generous to your point and assume it’s enough! Now, let’s suppose we want to extend the recording so sounds at 110db appear later on (say, an intense bass explosion in an action movie after a quiet scene early on). To do this without clipping, what range of discrete values do we need? 110db-10db = 100db = 100,000x greater amplitude than the pin drop. This means we need to be able to represent peak amplitude values of 1,600,000. This exceeds the ability of 16 bits to losslessly represent the quiet 10db pin drop and 110db explosions within the same movie’s audio track! You would need at least 21 bits in this example. And I’ve been generous with my assumptions here, making the extreme assumption that even 4bits per sample is enough to record a 10db pin drop, which is clearly not enough. If you think 110db is unrealistic for brief periods, it’s not, even for music: bass frequencies in particular can reach extreme amplitudes that might surprise you. I recently played an extremely well recorded orchestral piece at reference volume on my equipment and was so impressed by the dynamic range, I later measured the decibel levels (C-weighted). The quietest moments are around 65-70db, increases to 80-90db at times, and peaks several times momentarily to 105db when the bass drum hits (you feel it like a punch of an air wave)! It turns out this is exactly how real bass drums measure. Yet, the drum hit doesn’t sound unbearable loud (as treble would be at that decibel level), so much as tactile, because much of that energy is subsonic. If you do much research into perceptual psychology studies, you’ll see just how surprisingly difficult it can be to completely pin down the limits of human perception on average, let alone including outliers among the human population. In that sense, it’s entirely reasonable that a durable high fidelity recording format that holds up to time should be over-engineered, so there’s at least no worry that some study will prove it’s missing something later. That said, I don’t really agree with the parent post that most DACs are horrible, but I can’t comment on CD player DACs since I don’t use physical media. Most phone DACs are quite good. Most PC DACs are horrible not because of the DAC but because buzzing noises from system clocks and other sources always appear on my speakers (it’s very loud and noticeable), so I’m forced to use a cheap $20 external DAC, which quite frankly is nearly as good as anything else you’ll get at any price.
- collyw 7y ago
  > Audiophiles are very hard to take seriously because the hobby is 95% snake oil and 5% reasonable engineering. I bought some half decent speakers by my standards around a year ago (Creative T40s for what its worth). As a test I tried some MP3 tracks at various bitrates sitting on my hard drive to see if I could guess the difference. Most of the time I thought the 192kbps sounded better than the 320kbps.
  - thirdsun 7y ago
    To be fair, speakers are the component in your signal chain that actually has a major impact on audio quality - it is by far the most important factor and it should take up the majority of your (audio) budget. Not to sound condescending but those speakers you mention don't seem very decent at and probably don't warrant any conclusion towards the benefits of various compression settings or audiophile configurations in.
    - collyw 7y ago
      Yes, I am not an audiophile. They still sound a lot better than the TV speakers the sound was coming through before and they are more than good enough for me. Some kids listen to music through the speakers on their phones.
- patentatt 7y ago
  While it is ‘easy’ to make good DACs nowadays, the market is full of bad implementations that shoot themselves in the foot. And it’s not strictly correlated with price, as one might expect. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, check out audiosciencereview.com for a lot of good analysis and review of specific products.
msla 7y ago
CDs have better fidelity than vinyl. Vinyl sounds more like vinyl than CDs do, until a specific piece of vinyl is reduced to a shambles by time. People who really like vinyl have a bad habit of equivocating between the above two statements, using "better" to mean either "greater fidelity" (which is wrong) or "sounds more like vinyl" (which is a tautology) without signalling which meaning they mean. https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl) https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)
- dagw 7y ago
  The other aspect is that, especially for older music (say anything recording over 30 years old), the CD master is often different than the Vinyl master. In some cases this difference in mastering can lead to people preferring the vinyl over the CD and claiming vinyl "sounds better", when in fact all it is is they prefer the way the vinyl was mastered.
  - masklinn 7y ago
    IIRC that was one of the huge consequences of the loudness wars: you can't really master loud vynils, so they've avoided clipped mastering.
  - amaranth 7y ago
    The vinyl almost always has better mastering. CDs and digital audio in general still get mastered for the loudness war while vinyls are often mastered to have higher dynamic range. That'll make the CD sound better for radio or club play but the vinyl will sound better when you're listening at home.

by lagadu 7y ago

simias 7y ago

You'd have to come up with a good source to convince me that 16bits per sample is not good enough for consumer audio (or that you could tell the difference even in perfect conditions. So might be able to hear it, the vast majority of people won't) but beyond that it doesn't really matter in this discussion because vinyls have a much worse fidelity. If you sample vinyl audio at more than 16bits you'll just be sampling noise anyway. >pretty much all CD players have garbage-tier DAC implementations. A true audiophile I see, anything consumer-grade is "garbage" in order to justify the purchase of ridiculously overpriced equipment. The truth is that it's very cheap to design a decent quality DAC or ADC these days, mainly thanks to digital processing and the fact that those chips are made in huge quantities. Digital filters are high quality these days and the use of oversampling makes it a lot easier to design good analog filters. Audiophiles are very hard to take seriously because the hobby is 95% snake oil and 5% reasonable engineering. I'm sorry if you're part of the 5% and I overreacted but it's one of these hot buttons for me. I've spent so much time arguing with people that, no, it made to mathematical sense to want 32bit samples or 160kHz audio...

lagadu 7y ago
> A true audiophile I see, anything consumer-grade is "garbage" in order to justify the purchase of ridiculously overpriced equipment. Actually I'm rather fond of the $80 SDAC and it stands tall among other, more expensive stuff I have (I'm listening to it as type this in fact). It's miles ahead of any CD player DAC. Seriously, a CD transport into a cheap DAC will sound very noticeably better. Admittedly I've only sampled about a dozen or so supposedly good players and eventually lost interest so it's not a big sample pool. I'm with you in that I also agree that it's dumb how most amplitude-signal DACs market "32bit/768khz" despite that sample rate being effectively useless and the noise floor in DS chips being at around ~20 bits worth of resolution and that's a best case scenario. edit: honestly when it comes to amps and dacs, in my experience, there is no spec or measurement that correlates with how good it sounds so with those I pretty much gave up on anything other than my ears.
- sigmos 7y ago
  I have a thought it’s the composers’ intention to how listeners will hear. There was once I spent a long time tweaking frequencies to my taste, it’s clear we have too many parts to just to get the right pitch and nuance details.
- Synaesthesia 7y ago
  I don’t think anyone has ever heard the difference between DAC’s in a double blind test.
guywhocodes 7y ago
Last I checked it is 14bit. Very long time ago, but I'm very sure it used to be 14 and not sure if it is 16 now. Regardless I'm sure a lot older CDs have a quarter of the fidelity as a result
- projektfu 7y ago
  "There was a long debate over the use of 14-bit (Philips) or 16-bit (Sony) quantization, and 44,056 or 44,100 samples/s (Sony) or approximately 44,000 samples/s (Philips). When the Sony/Philips task force designed the Compact Disc, Philips had already developed a 14-bit D/A converter (DAC), but Sony insisted on 16-bit. In the end, 16 bits and 44.1 kilosamples per second prevailed. Philips found a way to produce 16-bit quality using its 14-bit DAC by using four times oversampling.[9]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio#Audio_format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_Disc_Digital_Audio#Aud...
electrograv 7y ago
Source: Section 3.5 (page 9) of this peer-reviewed meta-analysis days “it is well known that the dynamic range of human hearing may exceed 100db. Therefore, it is reasonable to speculate that bit depth beyond 16 bits may be perceived.” https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/13493/Reiss%20A%20Meta-Analysis%20of%20High%20Resolution%202016%20Published.pdf https://qmro.qmul.ac.uk/xmlui/bitstream/handle/123456789/134... Additionally, this is purely talking about loudness dynamic range, not even including resolution or JND (just noticeable difference). I will demonstrate to you below how even 20 bits per sample is insufficient in some cases. Imagine for a moment that you could argue that the human hearing threshold of quantization error is only 4 bits (only 16 discrete values!) at the sound level of a pin dropping (10db). Now, I think we can all agree that’s absurd; we need a lot more than just 16 discrete amplitude values to represent the sound of a pin drop indistinguishable from reality to a human ear. But for the moment, let’s be really really generous to your point and assume it’s enough! Now, let’s suppose we want to extend the recording so sounds at 110db appear later on (say, an intense bass explosion in an action movie after a quiet scene early on). To do this without clipping, what range of discrete values do we need? 110db-10db = 100db = 100,000x greater amplitude than the pin drop. This means we need to be able to represent peak amplitude values of 1,600,000. This exceeds the ability of 16 bits to losslessly represent the quiet 10db pin drop and 110db explosions within the same movie’s audio track! You would need at least 21 bits in this example. And I’ve been generous with my assumptions here, making the extreme assumption that even 4bits per sample is enough to record a 10db pin drop, which is clearly not enough. If you think 110db is unrealistic for brief periods, it’s not, even for music: bass frequencies in particular can reach extreme amplitudes that might surprise you. I recently played an extremely well recorded orchestral piece at reference volume on my equipment and was so impressed by the dynamic range, I later measured the decibel levels (C-weighted). The quietest moments are around 65-70db, increases to 80-90db at times, and peaks several times momentarily to 105db when the bass drum hits (you feel it like a punch of an air wave)! It turns out this is exactly how real bass drums measure. Yet, the drum hit doesn’t sound unbearable loud (as treble would be at that decibel level), so much as tactile, because much of that energy is subsonic. If you do much research into perceptual psychology studies, you’ll see just how surprisingly difficult it can be to completely pin down the limits of human perception on average, let alone including outliers among the human population. In that sense, it’s entirely reasonable that a durable high fidelity recording format that holds up to time should be over-engineered, so there’s at least no worry that some study will prove it’s missing something later. That said, I don’t really agree with the parent post that most DACs are horrible, but I can’t comment on CD player DACs since I don’t use physical media. Most phone DACs are quite good. Most PC DACs are horrible not because of the DAC but because buzzing noises from system clocks and other sources always appear on my speakers (it’s very loud and noticeable), so I’m forced to use a cheap $20 external DAC, which quite frankly is nearly as good as anything else you’ll get at any price.
collyw 7y ago
> Audiophiles are very hard to take seriously because the hobby is 95% snake oil and 5% reasonable engineering. I bought some half decent speakers by my standards around a year ago (Creative T40s for what its worth). As a test I tried some MP3 tracks at various bitrates sitting on my hard drive to see if I could guess the difference. Most of the time I thought the 192kbps sounded better than the 320kbps.
- thirdsun 7y ago
  To be fair, speakers are the component in your signal chain that actually has a major impact on audio quality - it is by far the most important factor and it should take up the majority of your (audio) budget. Not to sound condescending but those speakers you mention don't seem very decent at and probably don't warrant any conclusion towards the benefits of various compression settings or audiophile configurations in.
  - collyw 7y ago
    Yes, I am not an audiophile. They still sound a lot better than the TV speakers the sound was coming through before and they are more than good enough for me. Some kids listen to music through the speakers on their phones.
patentatt 7y ago
While it is ‘easy’ to make good DACs nowadays, the market is full of bad implementations that shoot themselves in the foot. And it’s not strictly correlated with price, as one might expect. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, check out audiosciencereview.com for a lot of good analysis and review of specific products.

msla 7y ago

CDs have better fidelity than vinyl. Vinyl sounds more like vinyl than CDs do, until a specific piece of vinyl is reduced to a shambles by time. People who really like vinyl have a bad habit of equivocating between the above two statements, using "better" to mean either "greater fidelity" (which is wrong) or "sounds more like vinyl" (which is a tautology) without signalling which meaning they mean. https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl) https://wiki.hydrogenaud.io/index.php?title=Myths_(Vinyl)

dagw 7y ago
The other aspect is that, especially for older music (say anything recording over 30 years old), the CD master is often different than the Vinyl master. In some cases this difference in mastering can lead to people preferring the vinyl over the CD and claiming vinyl "sounds better", when in fact all it is is they prefer the way the vinyl was mastered.
- masklinn 7y ago
  IIRC that was one of the huge consequences of the loudness wars: you can't really master loud vynils, so they've avoided clipped mastering.
- amaranth 7y ago
  The vinyl almost always has better mastering. CDs and digital audio in general still get mastered for the loudness war while vinyls are often mastered to have higher dynamic range. That'll make the CD sound better for radio or club play but the vinyl will sound better when you're listening at home.