5 ms·

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

26 points by hprotagonist 5y ago

5tefan 5y ago
Current main stream isn't worth listening in 16/44 either. I would be a critical listener with high expectations. Not trained professionally. I don't hear a difference going from 16/44 to 24/96. But I hear a tremendous difference listening to a good sound engineer and producer and a well performing artist. That's where my money goes.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
dang 5y ago
One past thread: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19318898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19318898 - March 2019 (314 comments)
ehutch79 5y ago
As an end product, I would have doubts that anyone could hear a difference past 24/48. Honestly 16/44.1 is just fine for most people. Especially when you run it through a lossy container. That said. A lot of people in the audio production space see stuff like this, and apply it to recording, where the loss of definition compounds. Also, aliasing is a major thing. So just because you don't need to be downloading 24/192 audio from spotify, don't say audio interfaces supporting it is pointless
- Maursault 5y ago
  > As an end product, I would have doubts that anyone could hear a difference past 24/48. Honestly 16/44.1 is just fine for most people. On both accounts I agree. But since many can hear the difference between 16/44 and 24/48, and all agree 24/48 is aurally superior, it would be nice to have it available when desired. I somewhat disagree on several points with the author of the article, and I think many of his declarative statements are purely opinion the fact of which he neatly obfuscates with some legitimate scientific facts.
ipspam 5y ago
Distilling this down to a technical arguement, and going back to basics, this level of resolution is pretty not relevant to 99.5+% of music listeners. If listening in the car, over Bluetooth, or on headphones, you are going to need tens of thousands of dollars to preserve that signal and not destroy it. RFI, EMI, and current leakage on the power line is going to render anything above Redbook (standard cd quality) useless. Speakers have a bad frequency response, but can be very detailed, so they aren't going to be an obstacle to hearing high-res audio. But the room is. The room is the undisputed kicked to this arguement. The room acts as a "wire" from the speakers to your ears, and there are fundamental problems with overcoming this "wire". Most people don't even try, and just ignore it altogether. For example, there is the ASRD, attack sustain release decay. Without sucking up the bass energy which is omnidirectional, you will only ever hear the attack well, and even that is sketchy. The sustain, release, decay will be drown out. Then there is the timing aspect. Any sounds that reach the ear within approx. 20ms will obscure the detail retrieval from the original source. That's a 20 foot bounce. So you need a LARGE room. Most people have small rooms, and ALL their "first reflections" are within that 20ms range, and even lots of "early reflections" So yeah, room geometry and physics render high Res audio irrelevant for everyone but the highly obsessed audiophile. The normies that aren't into audio have no clue, none at all, so they argue about high Res music when it's the LAST thing that is going to improve their musical experience.
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  With audio resolution, you can record frequencies at half of the refresh rate, so 192k audio codecs can record up to 96khz audio frequencies. With all but the highest quality ultrasonic tweeters, anything above about 30-40khz simply won't be played back, not to mention how anything above 22khz is inaudible to all but the rarest of humans, and anything above 16khz is inaudible to anyone in their mid-30s. That being said, 48khz audio files are good enough to deliver 24khz of audible frequency spectrum for the same reason, are ~1/5th the size, and humans are physically incapable of telling the difference between them and a 192khz audio file, and the people who say otherwise are either lying to themselves or they are picking up some artifact that is a consequence of playing 92khz audio through a speaker system that is incapable of reproducing it accurately.
dusted 5y ago
While I can hear the difference between 128 kbit mp3 and flac, I sometimes can't between 320kbit mp3 and flac. But that being said, on principle, I want as much information there as possible, no not as much as "makes sense", because common sense is debatable. Since sound is analogue, there's a new data-point every Planck time, at a resolution of how many Planck lengths I don't know.. Obviously, that's idiocracy.. But I'll take "this is provable many times more precise than you're physiologically able to hear" any day.
- dangravell 5y ago
  Indeed. And practically it does become important for example when transcoding later...
watersb 5y ago
Lousy production and loudness wars can ruin any audio codec.
iotku 5y ago
I agree that it's certainly overkill for listening sake, and that decent mp3/aac/opus encodes are generally indistinguishable in quality to a proper "lossless" format. That said, I still really do like having high bitdepth/sample rate audio available for download. Storage space is cheap and as physical CDs are getting phased out I don't want to be in a world where the best you can acquire is the minimal viable quality. If space is at a premium lossless audio with overkill quality can be transcoded to a smaller compressed format at 10s to 100s times realtime. Additionally it means should better compression schemes come out in the future you can reap the benefits of them. I had a lot of old CD rips from the early 2000s in 96kbps WMA and that was regrettable. As a scifi speculation for fun if in the future there were augmentations that improved human's hearing ability or effective brain links which could transmit audio more effectively than our ever deteriorating ears we'd want the best possible audio signal to feed into that.
rdtwo 5y ago
What’s considered the top end for headphones right now for under 500-600$? Used to be hd650s we’re the best has anything dethroned them?
- ipspam 5y ago
  All about use cases. In the open back, those are hard to beat. You are obviously a person of good taste as these are generally considered a flat and true headphone. I would however recommend buying used, and that might get you something nicer, like 800's. The other hifi headphone that everyone in the "know" seems to love is the Dan Clark aeon 2, open back. $900 new, $600ish used. https://danclarkaudio.com/aeon-2.html https://danclarkaudio.com/aeon-2.html The other thing to consider is amplification, but at the $500 price point you can probably get away with feeding it from a phone or entry level DAP. Once you get above this price point, there is a balancing act of signal and amplification Vs headphones, and you are into the thousands of dollars range. I would recommend an older used astell and Kern DAP to pair with a headphone like the HD650. Being free of the noise on your home electrical circuit and using battery will get you very close to ideal for very little money. Something like this: https://www.usaudiomart.com/details/649760711-astellampkern-ak120-ii-portable-high-definition/ https://www.usaudiomart.com/details/649760711-astellampkern-...

26 points by hprotagonist 5y ago

Current main stream isn't worth listening in 16/44 either. I would be a critical listener with high expectations. Not trained professionally. I don't hear a difference going from 16/44 to 24/96. But I hear a tremendous difference listening to a good sound engineer and producer and a well performing artist. That's where my money goes.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

dang 5y ago

One past thread: 24/192 Music Downloads and why they make no sense (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19318898 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19318898 - March 2019 (314 comments)

ehutch79 5y ago

As an end product, I would have doubts that anyone could hear a difference past 24/48. Honestly 16/44.1 is just fine for most people. Especially when you run it through a lossy container. That said. A lot of people in the audio production space see stuff like this, and apply it to recording, where the loss of definition compounds. Also, aliasing is a major thing. So just because you don't need to be downloading 24/192 audio from spotify, don't say audio interfaces supporting it is pointless

Maursault 5y ago
> As an end product, I would have doubts that anyone could hear a difference past 24/48. Honestly 16/44.1 is just fine for most people. On both accounts I agree. But since many can hear the difference between 16/44 and 24/48, and all agree 24/48 is aurally superior, it would be nice to have it available when desired. I somewhat disagree on several points with the author of the article, and I think many of his declarative statements are purely opinion the fact of which he neatly obfuscates with some legitimate scientific facts.

ipspam 5y ago

Distilling this down to a technical arguement, and going back to basics, this level of resolution is pretty not relevant to 99.5+% of music listeners. If listening in the car, over Bluetooth, or on headphones, you are going to need tens of thousands of dollars to preserve that signal and not destroy it. RFI, EMI, and current leakage on the power line is going to render anything above Redbook (standard cd quality) useless. Speakers have a bad frequency response, but can be very detailed, so they aren't going to be an obstacle to hearing high-res audio. But the room is. The room is the undisputed kicked to this arguement. The room acts as a "wire" from the speakers to your ears, and there are fundamental problems with overcoming this "wire". Most people don't even try, and just ignore it altogether. For example, there is the ASRD, attack sustain release decay. Without sucking up the bass energy which is omnidirectional, you will only ever hear the attack well, and even that is sketchy. The sustain, release, decay will be drown out. Then there is the timing aspect. Any sounds that reach the ear within approx. 20ms will obscure the detail retrieval from the original source. That's a 20 foot bounce. So you need a LARGE room. Most people have small rooms, and ALL their "first reflections" are within that 20ms range, and even lots of "early reflections" So yeah, room geometry and physics render high Res audio irrelevant for everyone but the highly obsessed audiophile. The normies that aren't into audio have no clue, none at all, so they argue about high Res music when it's the LAST thing that is going to improve their musical experience.

BizarroLand 5y ago
With audio resolution, you can record frequencies at half of the refresh rate, so 192k audio codecs can record up to 96khz audio frequencies. With all but the highest quality ultrasonic tweeters, anything above about 30-40khz simply won't be played back, not to mention how anything above 22khz is inaudible to all but the rarest of humans, and anything above 16khz is inaudible to anyone in their mid-30s. That being said, 48khz audio files are good enough to deliver 24khz of audible frequency spectrum for the same reason, are ~1/5th the size, and humans are physically incapable of telling the difference between them and a 192khz audio file, and the people who say otherwise are either lying to themselves or they are picking up some artifact that is a consequence of playing 92khz audio through a speaker system that is incapable of reproducing it accurately.

dusted 5y ago

While I can hear the difference between 128 kbit mp3 and flac, I sometimes can't between 320kbit mp3 and flac. But that being said, on principle, I want as much information there as possible, no not as much as "makes sense", because common sense is debatable. Since sound is analogue, there's a new data-point every Planck time, at a resolution of how many Planck lengths I don't know.. Obviously, that's idiocracy.. But I'll take "this is provable many times more precise than you're physiologically able to hear" any day.

dangravell 5y ago
Indeed. And practically it does become important for example when transcoding later...

watersb 5y ago

Lousy production and loudness wars can ruin any audio codec.

iotku 5y ago

I agree that it's certainly overkill for listening sake, and that decent mp3/aac/opus encodes are generally indistinguishable in quality to a proper "lossless" format. That said, I still really do like having high bitdepth/sample rate audio available for download. Storage space is cheap and as physical CDs are getting phased out I don't want to be in a world where the best you can acquire is the minimal viable quality. If space is at a premium lossless audio with overkill quality can be transcoded to a smaller compressed format at 10s to 100s times realtime. Additionally it means should better compression schemes come out in the future you can reap the benefits of them. I had a lot of old CD rips from the early 2000s in 96kbps WMA and that was regrettable. As a scifi speculation for fun if in the future there were augmentations that improved human's hearing ability or effective brain links which could transmit audio more effectively than our ever deteriorating ears we'd want the best possible audio signal to feed into that.

rdtwo 5y ago

What’s considered the top end for headphones right now for under 500-600$? Used to be hd650s we’re the best has anything dethroned them?

ipspam 5y ago
All about use cases. In the open back, those are hard to beat. You are obviously a person of good taste as these are generally considered a flat and true headphone. I would however recommend buying used, and that might get you something nicer, like 800's. The other hifi headphone that everyone in the "know" seems to love is the Dan Clark aeon 2, open back. $900 new, $600ish used. https://danclarkaudio.com/aeon-2.html https://danclarkaudio.com/aeon-2.html The other thing to consider is amplification, but at the $500 price point you can probably get away with feeding it from a phone or entry level DAP. Once you get above this price point, there is a balancing act of signal and amplification Vs headphones, and you are into the thousands of dollars range. I would recommend an older used astell and Kern DAP to pair with a headphone like the HD650. Being free of the noise on your home electrical circuit and using battery will get you very close to ideal for very little money. Something like this: https://www.usaudiomart.com/details/649760711-astellampkern-ak120-ii-portable-high-definition/ https://www.usaudiomart.com/details/649760711-astellampkern-...