7 ms·

Apple lossless goes up to 24bits at 192KHz, which is over 4mbps. I believe bluetooth 5.x only supports 2mbps, although I'm not sure. According to wikipedia, Ap

by float4 5y ago

Apple lossless goes up to 24bits at 192KHz, which is over 4mbps. I believe bluetooth 5.x only supports 2mbps, although I'm not sure. According to wikipedia, Apple did file a patent in 2019 for high bandwidth low latency audio streaming over bluetooth (up to 8mbps)[0]. Looks like they've been working on this for a while. [0] https://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2019/0104424.html https://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2019/0104424.html

qmmmur 5y ago
That is just so unbelievably overkill. Especially the sample rate.
- millzlane 5y ago
  Overkill is the perfect amount of kill for audiophiles.
  - dwighttk 5y ago
    Might not be enough. Have you seen the gold plated overkill?
    - Hamuko 5y ago
      Gold plated is far from overkill. Maybe not even cable risers (https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3c/fb/05/3cfb059ec7fde97d409068ba867e83a3.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3c/fb/05/3cfb059ec7fde97d4090...) are overkill in the audiophile community. Maybe not even your personal electricity pylon (https://thevinylfactory.com/news/japanese-audiophiles-personal-utility-pole/ https://thevinylfactory.com/news/japanese-audiophiles-person...) is overkill.
      - jolux 5y ago
        You joke but I wouldn't want to risk dirtying $10,000 cables by putting them on the floor.
      - zbuf 5y ago
        I hope Apple are using an audiophile-optimised memcpy() function: https://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/11/119979.html https://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/11/11997... > found that a function called memcpy was the culprit, most memory players use memcpy and this is one of the reasons why memory play sounds worse ie digital sounding. Fortunately there is an optimised version of memcpy from http://www.agner.org/optimize/ http://www.agner.org/optimize/, using this version removes the hard edge produced by memcpy.
        paradygm 5y ago
        Or making sure they are using literals instead of variables, and using gotos: https://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/12/120502.html https://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/12/12050...
        zbuf 5y ago
        The trouble with this threads is they straddle a gaping chasm between complete delusion, or amazing trolling. Just imagine if stuff was like this though and computing were more 'analogue' -- each of those 15 layers of JavaScript transpiling just degraded the quality of the end result slightly.
        spookthesunset 5y ago
        I have such a hard time imagining that thread being serious. Poe's law is in effect. Like seriously. What is going on with that thread?
        detaro 5y ago
        Really weird things happen with half-knowledge and fixed ideas built on it. If you "know" it'll sound different, it will sound different to you. Combine that with actual, unrelated variations and maybe a bug that fits the pattern at some point...
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - thescriptkiddie 5y ago
        This shit always gets me. I don't care how much you spend on electrostatic speakers, granite slabs, acoustic treatments, and magic speaker wire — your room will never, ever sound as good as a decent pair of headphones. That said there absolutely is a case for high-bitrate, losslessly-compressed, DRM-free, watermark-free audio as the standard, and that is sampling and remixing. Slowing down a 320 kbps mp3 by just 50% sounds like shit.
        Mediterraneo10 5y ago
        Some of the people concerned about room response are listening to surround-sound classical recordings. In works that involve a spatial element -- for example an orchestra in front and players that move around the hall (or are embedded within the audience), creating a 360° soundstage -- headphones just don't preserve that as well as actual speakers.
        kuschku 5y ago
        Headphones with a proper HRTF preserve that perfectly fine better than any actual speaker setup ever can. The typical demo for this functionality is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA
        Mediterraneo10 5y ago
        Recordings have to be specially recorded and processed for that. There are however many older recordings that were made without the use of such technology and are expected to be played on speakers in 5.0.
        kuschku 5y ago
        You can apply the same virtually as well: simulate a raytraced environment with 5.0 speakers and furniture, simulate an HRTF, and generate the resulting 2.0 audio. It's possible to do this in a way that's not in any way distinguishable from a real 5.0 setup
    - devNoise 5y ago
      The gold really lets you hear how much over the kill can be.
  - toomanybeersies 5y ago
    Audiophiles generally don't use Bluetooth, it's balanced cables all the way.
    - oneplane 5y ago
      Even "Directional" cables, and "Oxygen-free" and "Cryo" HDMI as well, because you know, that's what your digital signal cares about.
      - ziml77 5y ago
        Don't forget gold plated toslink connectors!
- StavrosK 5y ago
  In this house we obey the Shannon-Nyquist theorem!
- andrewzah 5y ago
  This is why "audiophile" is a joke term in the audio engineering community. It is not biologically possible for us (unless one is an alien) to hear above 22kHz. 44.1kHz is enough to record in perfect fidelity [0]. For strictly listening purposes, 192kHz/24bit is wasteful, just extreme overkill because "bigger numbers = more good". People can't even reliably detect a difference between 320kbps MP3s and source-quality FLAC/ALAC/WAV/PCM. On very good headphone and speaker setups. Good quality MP3/AAC is all one needs for airpods and the bluetooth protocol can easily handle those bitrates. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli... edit: changed record->playback. Here I'm just discussing playback; for audio production purposes 192kHz/24bit is desireable for several reasons. Once one ships that album/song though, it should be downmixed back to 44.1kHz/16bit.
  - qmmmur 5y ago
    It's not necessarily just that we can't hear above 20khz - recording above 44.1khz has its merits. For example, if you want to apply digital distortion or do amplitude modulation then up-sampling or having a high SR stops wrap around in the spectrum and getting all those nasty artefacts. The end user should never need to worry about this and it should be downsampled at the master.
    - aidenn0 5y ago
      You forgot the #1 reason for recording at high SR; using a lower order low-pass filter without affecting the audible range. Sharp digital low-pass filters have far fewer tradeoffs and better SNR than analog filters, so doing the anti-aliasing low-pass filter digitally has big advantages.
  - kuschku 5y ago
    The interesting part is in how actually valuable improvements are rare, while useless "improvements" are common. I've got all music in 44.1kHz or 48kHz FLAC (only on the server, so I can transcode it to ogg opus for mobile playback reducing the space usage without lossy to lossy artifacts). Similar effects apply to many other such cases. Audiophiles buy 10'000$ golden HDMI cables... which don't even support HDMI 2.0a. They buy gold-plated toslink cables (!)
londons_explore 5y ago
I assume that "up to 8mbps" probably means that in reality you can't use much more than 1 mbps because in a crowded space with lots of wifi devices and lots of other people using bluetooth headphones there will be lots of interference and data rates will be forced to go down. Bluetooth and Wifi already don't properly coexist - one device can transmit a bluetooth packet and another a wifi packet at the same time, and the likelihood is both packets will get clobbered and lost. Proper coexistence would involve a device saying "I want to reserve Frequency bands X, Y and Z for the next 1 millisecond", and then no other devices using those frequency bands for that time. That exists for wifi clients, but it doesn't interoperate with Bluetooth, thread or zigbee.
datahead 5y ago
I support getting the sampling rate and quality up. To what level? Idk. Have you ever been in a room with a DJ playing low quality music on a decent sound system? It's awful, grating. Now at least your everyday aspiring DJ has access to higher bitrate tunes and doesn't need to blast low quality junk out of the PA system.

by float4 5y ago

qmmmur 5y ago

That is just so unbelievably overkill. Especially the sample rate.

millzlane 5y ago
Overkill is the perfect amount of kill for audiophiles.
- dwighttk 5y ago
  Might not be enough. Have you seen the gold plated overkill?
  - Hamuko 5y ago
    Gold plated is far from overkill. Maybe not even cable risers (https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3c/fb/05/3cfb059ec7fde97d409068ba867e83a3.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/3c/fb/05/3cfb059ec7fde97d4090...) are overkill in the audiophile community. Maybe not even your personal electricity pylon (https://thevinylfactory.com/news/japanese-audiophiles-personal-utility-pole/ https://thevinylfactory.com/news/japanese-audiophiles-person...) is overkill.
    - jolux 5y ago
      You joke but I wouldn't want to risk dirtying $10,000 cables by putting them on the floor.
    - zbuf 5y ago
      I hope Apple are using an audiophile-optimised memcpy() function: https://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/11/119979.html https://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/11/11997... > found that a function called memcpy was the culprit, most memory players use memcpy and this is one of the reasons why memory play sounds worse ie digital sounding. Fortunately there is an optimised version of memcpy from http://www.agner.org/optimize/ http://www.agner.org/optimize/, using this version removes the hard edge produced by memcpy.
      - paradygm 5y ago
        Or making sure they are using literals instead of variables, and using gotos: https://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/12/120502.html https://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/12/12050...
        zbuf 5y ago
        The trouble with this threads is they straddle a gaping chasm between complete delusion, or amazing trolling. Just imagine if stuff was like this though and computing were more 'analogue' -- each of those 15 layers of JavaScript transpiling just degraded the quality of the end result slightly.
        spookthesunset 5y ago
        I have such a hard time imagining that thread being serious. Poe's law is in effect. Like seriously. What is going on with that thread?
        detaro 5y ago
        Really weird things happen with half-knowledge and fixed ideas built on it. If you "know" it'll sound different, it will sound different to you. Combine that with actual, unrelated variations and maybe a bug that fits the pattern at some point...
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - thescriptkiddie 5y ago
      This shit always gets me. I don't care how much you spend on electrostatic speakers, granite slabs, acoustic treatments, and magic speaker wire — your room will never, ever sound as good as a decent pair of headphones. That said there absolutely is a case for high-bitrate, losslessly-compressed, DRM-free, watermark-free audio as the standard, and that is sampling and remixing. Slowing down a 320 kbps mp3 by just 50% sounds like shit.
      - Mediterraneo10 5y ago
        Some of the people concerned about room response are listening to surround-sound classical recordings. In works that involve a spatial element -- for example an orchestra in front and players that move around the hall (or are embedded within the audience), creating a 360° soundstage -- headphones just don't preserve that as well as actual speakers.
        kuschku 5y ago
        Headphones with a proper HRTF preserve that perfectly fine better than any actual speaker setup ever can. The typical demo for this functionality is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IUDTlvagjJA
        Mediterraneo10 5y ago
        Recordings have to be specially recorded and processed for that. There are however many older recordings that were made without the use of such technology and are expected to be played on speakers in 5.0.
        kuschku 5y ago
        You can apply the same virtually as well: simulate a raytraced environment with 5.0 speakers and furniture, simulate an HRTF, and generate the resulting 2.0 audio. It's possible to do this in a way that's not in any way distinguishable from a real 5.0 setup
  - devNoise 5y ago
    The gold really lets you hear how much over the kill can be.
- toomanybeersies 5y ago
  Audiophiles generally don't use Bluetooth, it's balanced cables all the way.
  - oneplane 5y ago
    Even "Directional" cables, and "Oxygen-free" and "Cryo" HDMI as well, because you know, that's what your digital signal cares about.
    - ziml77 5y ago
      Don't forget gold plated toslink connectors!
StavrosK 5y ago
In this house we obey the Shannon-Nyquist theorem!
andrewzah 5y ago
This is why "audiophile" is a joke term in the audio engineering community. It is not biologically possible for us (unless one is an alien) to hear above 22kHz. 44.1kHz is enough to record in perfect fidelity [0]. For strictly listening purposes, 192kHz/24bit is wasteful, just extreme overkill because "bigger numbers = more good". People can't even reliably detect a difference between 320kbps MP3s and source-quality FLAC/ALAC/WAV/PCM. On very good headphone and speaker setups. Good quality MP3/AAC is all one needs for airpods and the bluetooth protocol can easily handle those bitrates. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampli... edit: changed record->playback. Here I'm just discussing playback; for audio production purposes 192kHz/24bit is desireable for several reasons. Once one ships that album/song though, it should be downmixed back to 44.1kHz/16bit.
- qmmmur 5y ago
  It's not necessarily just that we can't hear above 20khz - recording above 44.1khz has its merits. For example, if you want to apply digital distortion or do amplitude modulation then up-sampling or having a high SR stops wrap around in the spectrum and getting all those nasty artefacts. The end user should never need to worry about this and it should be downsampled at the master.
  - aidenn0 5y ago
    You forgot the #1 reason for recording at high SR; using a lower order low-pass filter without affecting the audible range. Sharp digital low-pass filters have far fewer tradeoffs and better SNR than analog filters, so doing the anti-aliasing low-pass filter digitally has big advantages.
- kuschku 5y ago
  The interesting part is in how actually valuable improvements are rare, while useless "improvements" are common. I've got all music in 44.1kHz or 48kHz FLAC (only on the server, so I can transcode it to ogg opus for mobile playback reducing the space usage without lossy to lossy artifacts). Similar effects apply to many other such cases. Audiophiles buy 10'000$ golden HDMI cables... which don't even support HDMI 2.0a. They buy gold-plated toslink cables (!)

londons_explore 5y ago

I assume that "up to 8mbps" probably means that in reality you can't use much more than 1 mbps because in a crowded space with lots of wifi devices and lots of other people using bluetooth headphones there will be lots of interference and data rates will be forced to go down. Bluetooth and Wifi already don't properly coexist - one device can transmit a bluetooth packet and another a wifi packet at the same time, and the likelihood is both packets will get clobbered and lost. Proper coexistence would involve a device saying "I want to reserve Frequency bands X, Y and Z for the next 1 millisecond", and then no other devices using those frequency bands for that time. That exists for wifi clients, but it doesn't interoperate with Bluetooth, thread or zigbee.

datahead 5y ago

I support getting the sampling rate and quality up. To what level? Idk. Have you ever been in a room with a DJ playing low quality music on a decent sound system? It's awful, grating. Now at least your everyday aspiring DJ has access to higher bitrate tunes and doesn't need to blast low quality junk out of the PA system.